Trump just seems like nothing to me. Meanwhile we have a 50 year war on Americans that have hate ****ed everyday Americans thru laws. At this point every picture of Nixon should be redone to where he is wearing a Redcoat uniform. Him and his type turned our laws, court rooms and law enforcement into machines that wage war on Americans for political power.


When it comes to waging war on liberated people, Nixon wins by a landslide. We have been less free as a people since that **** was allowed to have power.

He greatly escalated and prolonged the war for years before he lost it.

It’s sad that Nixon’s role in Vietnam has been whitewashed, I wonder how tomorrow’s Republicans will try to clean up Trumps legacy.

Even though guys like him and Reagan would get chased off as a couple wacky libtards these days Eisenhower was an R I forget who was his vp?

It's a tough sell to try to say Eisenhower started the war. He supported the French and had a few troops there, but specifically avoided taking over for the French when he had the option to. If you really want to split hairs you could say that the ball got rolling when Truman didn't support independence for Vietnam like we were for the Philippines.

I was just messing around. I imagine there were plenty of people of both stripes who were happy to try to contain the spread of the commies regardless of what letter was in charge


A conservative cop can walk into a room full of D pols set against spending on some new toys and toss out an off-handed comment about decrepit equipment failing when it happens to be their lives on the line---and 10mins later everyone will be saying Sold! But in black and white it will be the Ds that 'did it'

Well, whatever side you take on the comparison, there's a new reason to like it being made in the first place:

Trump explodes at Nixon comparisons as he prepares to leave office

It is equally sad that Kennedy's role in starting the war has been whitewashed. Did Nizon prolong a war waged by Kennedy and Johnson for his own benefit? Yes. But is he any more culpable than they in the waging of that war? No.

The point was that Nixon fits neatly into the general pattern of war mongering presidents from 1950-2000.

Perhaps the most horrible thing Nixon did was help put Pinochet in power.

But the question was who was worse for US democracy. That's clearly Trump. US democracy had barely been established when Nixon took office - the civil rights act was only a few years old.

At least Trump is the worst this millennium, so far?

There’s no need for Nixon apologia to answer this question.

It’s Trump. He literally incited his supporters to subvert obviously valid democratic processes with his #stopthesteal push. He then almost struck a total (and literal) death blow by encouraging his supporters to take the fight to The Capitol which almost led to the assassination of elected representatives literally certifying his electoral defeat. He has poisoned the minds of tens of millions of people so they can’t see reality.

Why do you feel obligated to engage in whatabaoutism here? It seems so weird.

I mean, we really cant answer this question until we see what the next several years bring but Nixon would be proud of himself if folks are snap picking Trump right now.

Not sure what you are getting at. Some of you prove the difficulty of talking with the ideologically blindered and demonstrate the dangers of irony. Nixon was awful in many respects, but not particularly awful by the standards of recent Republicans. His foreign policy was no more awful than his immediate predecessors and almost all presidents since, with maybe the exception of Carter and obama.

He was reviled for the damage he did to US democracy, but that viewpoint assumes there was a democracy before him, and that's a white privilege point of view if I ever heard one. I was born before Nixon resigned and before schools were desegregated where Iived .... He damaged a fiction of a democracy. The middle class and the kennedy worshippers who believed in the cold war melting pot bullshit couldn't stomach it, and with good reason, but the idea that the US was a democracy was a fraud then, more than it is now, in spite of all the crap now.

Trump is something new in the last century of internal US politics. He's a potential hitler/ mussolini. The US had those before, strom thurmond and eugene talmadge types, but they never got further than senator or governor. The damage Trump has done may be permanent and it's effects are only beginning. He empowered horrible forces that will continue to thrive. Nixon's corruption was just the presidential version of the mayor who sells public property to his brother and uses the mjnicipal police to cover it up. His abuse of his opponents had some seed of Trumpian behavior, but it's hard to tell his government apart from that of bush - it even had cheney, rumsfelds and bush in it. Trump's is reality tv.

Good point.

“Who is the worst driver?” and “which driver caused the most damage?” are two different questions. Related, but not necessarily with the same answer.

How much damage Trump has done also depends on the resilience of the system and country. Unlike Nixon, Trump is not dead either. His damage-dealing days are unlikely to be over.

Trump is done. He's too old to continue as an important force. And the big money sees him as a losing bet. But there will be others now.

The problem is all those who studied him and learned from him, coupled with a wide base of disenchanted rural folks moving to the far right, armed and ready to use their arms, feeling empowered. That's not new either, at least to anyone who's ever lived in the rural south, but it's more widespread and suddenly has been legimated. That's probably Trump's worst legacy is legitimating openly antidemocratic, fascistic rhetoric and behavior.

Now that you wrote it, I cannot help but think it has validity.

I mean, it's the year of Our Lord 20-dickety-20 and apparently people still feel the need to write extended posts apologizing for Nixon's Vietnam War shenanigans. I don't know what compels people to do this. It's an odd pathology.

Like, normally if I go out and say "Boy, Nixon sure was a jerk," the reaction I get is "Sure was!" from most people. But on the internet, you're sure to encounter this weird whataboutism.


Just to be clear, Nixon tried to sabotage the peace process to end the Vietnam War because he thought it would help him win an election. He then illegally expanded the war into countries that weren't even involved in hostilities. I'm not really sure why people need to downplay or qualify the fact that he was a warmongering ghoul.

I never wrote anything apologizing for Nixon. I think you can't comprehend that my first post about him was slightly satirical.

Nixon was no worse than LBJ on Vietnam, and no worse than Reagan or Bush or Clinton in many senses.

Saying that doesn't equate to saying something good about Nixon.

But you are of those who don't allow criticism of Kennedy for Cuba and Vietnam.

The US has long been a borderline fascist country in it's mainstream politics. Iraq bothers you less than Vietnam because there was no draft for Iraq. Rumsfelds learned that from Vietnam if he learned nothing else.

I'm not sure why people need to downplay that all of Kennedy, LBJ, Reagan, bush, Clinton, bush were warmongering ghouls.

Vietnam was a bipartisan war. Each president, from Democratic Truman to Republican Nixon, deepened the American commitment to fabricating a South Vietnam.

Nixon's reputation increased significantly as time went on, even in his own lifetime.

He wrote several well-reviewed books on foreign affairs.

I'm not gonna necessarily disagree with you here re Trump in terms of potetial. Had he have been a cold war potus then who knows, he may well have been worse than Nixon or arguably favoured a more "isolationist" (if you will) approach, coulda gone one way or another and we'll never know.

But when you're comparing Presidents in terms of who was worse, then you go by the results or their legacy.
Nixon subverted and usurped several democracies world wide. Another poster commented on the poll being about in terms of "US democracy" but I find that meaningless as democracy is democracy. US democracy is no better or worse than any other western democracy in general terms. So in that respect, Nixon was a far bigger threat to democracy and a far worse president in terms of human suffering. Yes there was a Cold War backdrop but that doesn't justify or excuse Nixon's crimes against humanity. Just as an Islamic terrorism backdrop didn't excuse Bush's war crimes, by way of another example of presidents worse than Trump. Trump's a populist narcissist sleazebag and in his heart I'd say he'd love to be a Kim Jong U style tyrant. But in less than a week he'll be gone and will simply cry about it on whatever social media platform hasn't banned him yet.

The most dangerous thing he's done is arguably incited a riot which led to a pack of thugs, some of whom were domestic terrorists and white supremacists/neo-Nazis swarming the capitol, leading to several deaths including the murder of a police officer.

For all its abhorrence, it's nothing compared to what Nixon did and was in terms of a threat to democracy, for me and it's not even close.

One problem during Nixon was communism, a totalitarian system with great influence. Cuba and the missile crisis. "Not a second Cuba". And so on.

Perhaps the case that best exemplifies Trump's erosion of democracy, its norms and its integrity is actually one of the less dramatic ones.

In September 2019, the president listed Alabama as one of the states about to be hit by hurricane Dorian. Which as one can imagine led to some worried citizens in Alabama and a lot of questions, as this did not show up on any official forecasts. Instead of admitting the blunder, the president doubled down on the line over the coming week. His lies reached as an absurd crescendo when he later that week showed reporters an official weathermap that had obviously been badly altered with a sharpie.

But how do we see erosion of democracy and norms here? Because of the readily available evidence of his lies steered officials.

We saw administration officials refuse to counter their president. We saw leading figures in NOAA ordering employees of the National Weather Service not to provide opinions to the press. This despite the fact that it was well known that the president was wrong and that it was well known that the weather map displayed was fake. We know this from FOIA requests from various news and media outlets that revealed these things in internal e-mail chains.

But it went even further then that. A few days later, we got weird unsigned statements from NOAA that their models did predict that the hurricane would strike Alabama. It also stated that statements to the contrary had been wrong. The reason for this development we learned yet a few days later, when we found out that high ranking administration officials had personally leaned on the leaders of NOAA to make them support the president's lies. So instead of admitting error, a large apparatus of government officials sprang into action, forcing various federal agencies to continue the lie on his behalf, silenced those who wanted to correct him and left the reputation and integrity of two important government bodies in tatters. Not only that, when the president went on national television and looked like a blundering fool with a badly faked weather map, they all looked the other way, pretended like nothing had happened, knowingly lied about it and forced others to lie about it. The entire GOP campaign apparatus also went into high gear to protect the president's reputation.

It is an absurd case and in the grand scheme of things probably not an important case. But it shows us in embarrassing detail how the president, his administration and his appointed officials went about their business. The administration had become a large and powerful political apparatus whose primary function was to make sure the president's lies became the accepted truth.

Ignoring the specific question about US democracy, Trump did much less bad outside the US than Nixon. Besides the wall he started no overt wars and instigated no coups except in DC, where he failed. In that sense Nixon was worse, but probably this just reflects that the US- China cold war is wages on economic and digital terrain.

Basically the Trump presidency was a living embodiment of that meme where the boss tosses the employee who talks back out of the window.