In his last days in office, Donald Trump reportedly ordered his dwindling circle of attendants never to mention Richard Nixon’s name in his presence. We can guess the reason: Nixon means failure. Even people who know nothing about politics know that. But even if Trump and Nixon ended up in roughly the same place—political oblivion—the roads they took to that destination could not have been more different.
The single most revealing moment of Nixon’s career did not happen while he was in office. It came a few years after his resignation, when he informed a television interviewer that, from his perspective, “if the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.” This was a belief, Nixon made clear, that he had put a great deal of thought into. If a president ordered his underlings to break the law, whether for reasons of “national security” or “a threat to internal peace and order,” they had to assume that they would not face potential legal consequences when they did it; otherwise, Nixon explained, they would be in an “impossible position.” Thus, anything the president wanted done was, by definition, legal. At the bottom of all of Nixon’s misdeeds lay this crackbrained conviction, a circular argument that had nothing to do with the written law, legal precedent, or anything else outside of one man’s peculiar vision of the way things ought to be.
Last April, Trump informed the nation that he had the right to stop governors from keeping their states locked down in response to the pandemic, making this remarkable assertion: “When somebody’s the president of the United States, the authority is total.” His own vice president—often cast as a voice of reason within the Trump administration—was quick to back him up, asserting that presidents possess sweeping authority during “national emergencies.” Republican leaders did not rebuke the president, even in private.
The differences between these two statements are negligible; it is safe to say that Trump’s understanding of his own power was, if anything, even more grandiose than Nixon’s. But there is one difference that is worth dwelling on. Nixon kept his strange theory of the presidency a secret as long as he held office; he no doubt knew that most of the country, in their woeful ignorance, would probably not agree with him. “The average American is just like the child in the family,” he remarked to an interviewer in 1972. Not until he was well out of office, and desperately trying to redeem his reputation, did Nixon reveal the odd convictions that had led him to certain disgrace. Trump, however, felt free to proclaim his “total” authority in front of a roomful of newsmen, and the question is why.
Trump’s greatest asset as a politician, right up until the very last month of his presidency, has always been an uncannily accurate understanding of how much he could get away with. He knew as well as anyone that Republicans had long since adopted their own version of Nixon’s motto: If a Republican president does it, that means that it is not illegal. Thus, Trump was not encumbered—as many people in his place might have been—by his profound ignorance of the law, or even of the duties of his office. He knew that his faction would defend him no matter what he did. Republican leaders, in those long-ago days when the party was divided between conservatives and moderates, understood when Nixon was finished, and told him so. They told him to resign, and he did. Trump never had any reason to worry about that.
Thus, where Nixon had once justified breaking the law in the name of “national security,” Trump could justify almost anything he wanted to do in even starker terms: He was good and his opponents were bad. His enemies were America’s enemies. To love Trump was an act of patriotism; to hate him was to hate the nation itself.
Trump pushed this message so forcefully that the entire country seemed to absorb it; it was no accident that his critics so often found themselves arguing that America itself was odious and that the president was simply an authentic reflection of its odiousness, a claim that I don’t remember hearing from many liberals during George W. Bush’s wretched eight years in office. This, too, was a novel development of the Trump years; numerous Americans now think of their country as a rotten place, its cherished ideals a sham, every hero a fiend in disguise.
Who benefited from such an argument? Quite plainly, Trump did. If America is beyond redemption, then who could argue against the open crookedness of the Trump administration? In these arguments, America as a republic does not even exist. There is no democratic project to be saved, and no rule of law worth upholding. If there is nothing to value in the country, then Trump is not to be denounced for his criminality but admired for his honesty. A few weeks ago a local activist group in Idaho defaced a statue of Lincoln; the group’s spokesperson proudly informed a reporter that they had done it because Lincoln owned slaves. This, too, is part of Trump’s horrible legacy—ignorance in response to ignorance, crassness in answer to crassness, contempt for public space to match Trump’s own contempt for the republic.
That was the direction that Trump seemed to be pushing the entire country in, and nothing seemed to stand in his way, not even losing an election—until he provoked the mob that attacked the Capitol on January 6. In a few hours, the glue that had held together the entire Trump machine simply dissolved like sugar water. For four years, the president had claimed to be the defender of “law and order”; now his goons had murdered a police officer. He had claimed to stand for “America” against what he characterized as a left-wing mob; now a mob had launched a brutal attack on the People’s House itself. It was as if a land of sleepwalkers had been jolted awake. As I write, Trump stands on the brink of deeper and more lasting disgrace than Nixon.
That is entirely fitting, for what Trump did to this country was worse than anything Nixon ever dreamed of doing. Nixon tried to circumvent the law, driven by a crazy but sincerely held notion of what self-styled great leaders ought to be permitted to do. Trump acted as if there were no law, and encouraged his admirers to do the same. The result is what we saw on January 6, and it felt like the long-simmering eruption of a volcano.
That the Republicans would refuse to convict Trump was obvious; they have supported him so long that to label him a criminal would be to convict themselves. But it scarcely matters. He really did go too far this time. Trump will never return to politics, no matter what his followers want to believe. Already he seems little more than a shadow, reduced to issuing press releases like any schmuck. Trump is gone. But think of what he did to us—is that gone?
After Nixon’s fall, many people found themselves echoing the words of the man who took his place—the system works. That comforting thought is not available to us; this time, the system didn’t work. That is a bitter lesson to take to heart as we leave this strange era behind. Asked what kind of government the writers of the Constitution had given us, Dr. Benjamin Franklin famously answered: “A republic—if you can keep it.” Whether or not we can keep it remains to be seen.