"The search for parallels between then and now often includes the juxtaposition of Mr. Trump and Mr. Nixon, the president often relegated in popular memory..."

"... unfairly, I believe — to a symbol of what the ’60s rose up against.... Scandal followed Mr. Nixon throughout his career, as it has Mr. Trump. Both scrambled back to the forefront of politics — Mr. Nixon until he was felled by Watergate. ('He left. I don’t leave. A big difference,' is Mr. Trump’s take.) Both positioned themselves as victims of liberal elites and champions of a silent majority; both maintained an enemies list of people and institutions they wanted to punish.... But... Mr. Nixon entered the fray only at the tail end of the ’60s.... His predecessors, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, were far more responsible for the upheavals of that time.... Mr. Trump, by contrast, defines what is happening today. The troubles of the country and world, whether the Gaza protests, the war in Ukraine or unchecked immigration, may predate his second term, but the way he has incorporated them into his broad assault on American institutions and values stamps this era with his brand. Mr. Nixon never came close to anything of the sort...."

Writes Serge Schmemann, in "It May Feel Like the 1960s. But It’s Worse" (NYT).

John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson are held responsible but Obama and Biden are not. Why not?! The obvious difference between Nixon and Trump is that Trump is currently in power and the opposition to him is happening now. There's no political cost to holding Kennedy and Johnson accountable now. But when Nixon was in power, he was hated and demonized, quite effectively. The big difference between Trump and Nixon is the one Trump is quoted as saying: "He left. I don’t leave. A big difference."

"Well, Kamala Harris, of course, hasn't had a lot of experience in foreign policy, but she's learned a lot at the side of President Biden as his vice president."

"So we're sort of guessing a little bit about her vision and her views. I think our general assumption is that she's pretty close to where Biden is, and I think it's safe to assume that she is basically a pretty conventional center left Democratic, foreign-policy thinker. I mean, to the extent that she brings her own individual perspective, it probably comes from her time as a prosecutor and a lawyer that she believes in the international rules-based order. So she looks at foreign policy in the sense of who is following the rules, in effect, in terms of whether it be trade security or economics."

Said Peter Baker on "Alliance vs. Isolation: Harris and Trump’s Competing Views on Foreign Policy," today's episode of the NYT "Daily" podcast (transcript and audio at that link)(I've tweaked some punctuation, etc.).

How are we to understand Harris as anything other than a continuation of Biden? That's what Peter Baker is doing.

And here's how he contrasts Trump:

"Reagan... was older than Nixon but had the swagger and ease of a much younger man, marrying the sort of sunny optimism Nixon could never muster..."

"... with the raw appeal to a growing reactionary vote that Nixon craved. Just as Mr. DeSantis, with his wars on critical race theory, 'woke' Disney and Covid restrictions, is trying to outmaneuver Mr. Trump on the cultural terrain that’s always been so vital in Republican primaries, Reagan outshone Nixon with his open disdain for Johnson’s landmark civil rights agenda, the burgeoning antiwar movement and the emerging hippie counterculture. He railed against the 'small minority of beatniks, radicals and filthy-speech advocates' upending California and successfully demoralized Brown, who remarked, shellshocked, after Reagan’s triumph that 'whether we like it or not, the people want separation of the races.' Nixon rebuffed Reagan and the others in one of the last primaries in which delegates and party insiders, rather than the will of voters, played a significant role in determining the nomination."

Writes Ross Barkan in "Trump Will Be Tough to Beat, if 1968 Is Any Guide" (NYT).

Brown = Pat Brown, whom Reagan had defeated for Governor of California in 1966. As Governor, Reagan was running in the 1968 presidential primary, so that makes him somewhat analogous to DeSantis, right now.

Obviously, Nixon beat Reagan. But is Trump like Nixon? Barkan says: "Nixon was far more introspective, methodical and policy-minded than Trump." That Nixon sound more like DeSantis. And wouldn't it be easy to say Trump is like Reagan? I picture those 2 smiling and optimistic. 

The NYT "took only minutes — with assistance from publicly available information — ... to deanonymize location data and track the whereabouts of President Trump."

So we are told, in a piece titled "How to Track President Trump," in what feels to me like too much of a prod to readers to do it yourself.

Here's how the article is promoted on the front page of the NYT website (where the image is animated, giving the impression that you can follow the President around in real time if you learn this how-to advice):



Notice the title at the bottom left: "Why Is Trump Finding More Protection Than Nixon Did?" That's not an article about the personal, physical protection of the President from violence, but you don't know that until you click through to the article, and I see no good innocent reason to use the word "Protection" in that headline. Even if the potential to stimulate of violent ideation was purely accidental, it should have been noticed and changed. The "How to Track President Trump" image was already creepy (especially in the animated version, where the dot moves quickly across a GPS image).

The "Protection" article elaborates many differences between the facts relating to impeachment for the 2 Presidents.

The "How to Track" article raises an alarm that it's too easy to track the President (and anyone else). It ends with a plea for more regulation: "The sources who provided the trove of location information to Times Opinion did so to press for regulation and increased scrutiny of the location data market... So far, Washington has done virtually nothing to address the threats, and location data companies have every reason to keep refining their tracking, sucking up more data and selling it to the highest bidders."

"Under pressure over his possible impeachment, President Richard M. Nixon supposedly talked to the paintings in the White House. President Bill Clinton..."

"... absently toyed with his old campaign buttons. President Trump punches out Twitter messages in the lonely midnight hour. Long after his staff has gone home, long after the lights have gone out elsewhere around the capital, the besieged 45th president hunkers down in the upstairs residential portion of the Executive Mansion venting his frustration and cheering on his defenders through social media blasts."

Big news. The President tweets. A lot. When he's getting impeached and when he's not getting impeached.

But this is the NYT, assuring its readers that "For Trump, Impeachment May Be a Political Plus, but Also a Personal Humiliation." The anti-Trumpers know they're losing — he won't be removed and he's even benefiting politically — but damn it, at least they're humiliating him. The desire to humiliate — such a lowly emotion. And yet, the NYT is using it to pump up its despondent readers.

Subheadline: "As the House moves toward what even he says is an inevitable vote to impeach him for high crimes and misdemeanors, President Trump toggles between self-pity and combativeness." Toggles! How do they get this detail on the inside of his head?

The fact is he's not doing anything special to impeachment — nothing like talking to paintings or fingering old buttons. It sounds like Trump continues to Trump, same as ever. In which case, he's not losing it. He's carrying on — bold and tough, fighting and seeming to enjoy and get energy from the fight.

By the way, is it true that Nixon talked to the paintings? The NYT avoids responsibility for fact checking with the word "supposedly." It's a story. They say he got to talking to paintings.

I did my own brief research on the topic and stopped when I came to a Frank Rich column in the NYT, titled "Has He Started Talking to the Walls?" The date is December 3, 2006. 2006 — it is not about Trump. The question that the NYT would like to aim at Trump was aimed, back then, at George W. Bush:

It turns out we’ve been reading the wrong Bob Woodward book to understand what’s going on with President Bush. The text we should be consulting instead is “The Final Days,” the Woodward-Bernstein account of Richard Nixon talking to the portraits on the White House walls while Watergate demolished his presidency. As Mr. Bush has ricocheted from Vietnam to Latvia to Jordan in recent weeks, we’ve witnessed the troubling behavior of a president who isn’t merely in a state of denial but is completely untethered from reality. It’s not that he can’t handle the truth about Iraq. He doesn’t know what the truth is....

So let's not forget: George Bush got the same treatment from the NYT.

Talking to paintings is a favorite way to say the President has gone mad. But Trump has tweeted all along. Nothing has changed. He hasn't gone anywhere. The tweeting is right there, a direct line from the President's brain to us, and we can see whether it's changed or not. Talking to paintings is something that a President does in isolation, withdrawing, and becoming abstracted — "untethered from reality." Tweeting is the opposite. It's totally connected and out in the open. It's something the President does with us — leaping over the press.

We don't have to wait for Bob Woodward to find out what happened behind the scenes. It's all already on the public stage. If the tweets are any crazier than before, we could see that — unless we've all gone crazy together and have grown accustomed to the weirdness — and we wouldn't need the NYT to tell us about it.

I just bought the Kindle version of "The Final Days" so I could see exactly what it said about Nixon talking to paintings. I think this is the only passage:

“The President . . . ” [Nixon's son-in-law Ed] Cox began. His voice rose momentarily. “The President was up walking the halls last night, talking to pictures of former Presidents—giving speeches and talking to the pictures on the wall.”

ADDED: Proofreading this post, I saw the answer to my question "How do they get this detail on the inside of his head?" It's: They're reading the same tweets that we are. They don't have special access to sources. They're simply interpreting the same tweets we get.

As I said, Trump has leaped over the press. It must be so annoying for them. Maybe they're talking to paintings. Maybe to a painting of George W. Bush: Oh, George! How I miss you now! How good you were to let us trash you for 8 years and never to stoop to attacking us, like your miserable successor!

"Richard Nixon's most lasting rhetorical contribution to American politics came at the tail end of a 32-minute speech. Exactly 50 years ago Sunday..."

"... and less than a year into his presidency, Nixon presented his plan for a 'just peace' in what had become a Southeast Asian morass.... 'So tonight, to you, the great silent majority of my fellow Americans, I ask for your support,' he said. By this he was referring to the white working and middle classes of the nation's heartland, the 'non-shouters' and 'non-demonstrators' he had invoked a year earlier at the Republican National Convention.... Nixon understood that, by 1968, millions of white Americans detested what they saw as growing disrespect for authority and the American way.... ...Nixon neatly conflated the politics of resentment with the feeling of victimhood at the heart of many reactionaries' sense of identity. Society was rapidly changing, and they wanted no part of it. These 'forgotten Americans,' as Nixon called them, valued their all-white neighborhoods and schools, and they appreciated America's defense of the free world. So when Nixon promised 'law and order,' he sent a message that he would stop these changes by silencing activists on college campuses and keeping America's cities from burning.... [T]he 'silent majority' was about race, yes, but it was also about youth. Millions of patriotic Americans despised the young activists they saw on their television sets, viewing them as spoiled and elitist malcontents whose drug-induced protests were destroying the nation from within - while their non-college-going, working-class counterparts fought for the country in Vietnam.... Today it is President Donald Trump who is giving voice to this same white population. Like Nixon before him, Trump uses a celebration of the 'silent majority' - it's 'back,' he declared in 2015..."

From "How Richard Nixon captured white rage - and laid the groundwork for Donald Trump" by Scott Laderman (which I originally encountered at The Eagle, but I see that it's also in The Washington Post, here). Laderman is a history professor and the author of "The 'Silent Majority' Speech: Richard Nixon, the Vietnam War, and the Origins of the New Right." This new book is only 192 pages and costs $31.69 on Kindle — $107.70 as a hardback book. Those are some strange prices!

Anyway... I've had Nixon's "silent majority" speech noted on my calendar — on November 3rd — for a long time, and I really wanted to blog it for you as one of my "50 years ago today" posts. I tried watching the speech yesterday, but I could not make it. It is so awkward and painful:



Now that I know "silent majority" is at the very end, I'll recommend starting here, with "I know it may not be fashionable to speak of patriotism or national destiny these days...":



Please note that Nixon's appeal to the great silent majority in this speech is completely about the Vietnam War. He's trying to summon support for his effort to "win the peace." There's nothing racial or anti-youth in this speech. There's nothing divisive in what he's saying: "Let us be united for peace." Of course, everyone I knew hated him. I was a couple months into my college career at the time, and I assure you we all hooted at the TV screen and regarded him as a horrendous villain, whatever he did.

Two hundred years ago this Nation was weak and poor. But even then, America was the hope of millions in the world. Today we have become the strongest and richest nation in the world. And the wheel of destiny has turned so that any hope the world has for the survival of peace and freedom will be determined by whether the American people have the moral stamina and the courage to meet the challenge of free world leadership.

Let historians not record that when America was the most powerful nation in the world we passed on the other side of the road and allowed the last hopes for peace and freedom of millions of people to be suffocated by the forces of totalitarianism.

And so tonight — to you, the great silent majority of my fellow Americans — I ask for your support.

ADDED: In saying "to you, the great silent majority," he had to be leaving some people out. Like Hillary with her "basket of deplorables" or Romney with his 47%, Nixon had the idea that some Americans could not be reached. And he set this group to the side as he made his appeal. Just before he got to the part of the speech quoted above, he spoke of a minority, and these were the people exemplified by the protest sign, "Lose in Vietnam, bring the boys home." He said that "a vocal minority" can't "dictate" the policy. But he did address the minority with kind words:

I respect your idealism. I share your concern for peace. I want peace as much as you do.... I want to end [the war] so that the energy and dedication of you, our young people, now too often directed into bitter hatred against those responsible for the war, can be turned to the great challenges of peace, a better life for all Americans, a better life for all people on this earth.

"It is as if Nixon held a press conference and began it by saying, 'Yes, I’m a crook. And the American people deserve to know it.'"

"'But McGovern would have been a terrible president and so it was entirely worthwhile. Sure, I committed a high crime in tampering with the last election. But sometimes high crimes are necessary to save the country from the Democrats.' Nixon, for all his profound flaws, would never have said such a thing. His cover-up was, in a way, a tribute to the rule of law the way hypocrisy is often a tribute to virtue. He had some reverence for the Constitution, even as he betrayed it. He had some sense of responsibility for the wider system of government, and for his own political party, even as he struggled to save himself. Nixon committed high crimes — but, unlike Trump, he didn’t celebrate or publicize them or declare them legal and simply dare the body politic to take him down."

Writes Andrew Sullivan (in "Trump Is Begging to Be Impeached. Give Him What He Wants — Immediately" in New York Magazine).

But it isn't as if Nixon held a press conference and said "I’m a crook." It's as if Nixon had stepped down from his "I am not a crook" abstraction and said "I worked to cover up the break in and it was perfectly legal and done for the good of the country." Many people would have been shocked. They'd call the President a liar and lecture righteously about the real meaning of the law. That would be the analogy to Trump. And — who knows? — maybe if Nixon had the Trumpian style, he'd have toughed it out and kept his partisans from cutting off their support and dooming him.

And here's a funny sentence from Sullivan: "Nixon ordered the break-in and the cover-up and tried to keep it all on the down low, where indeed it might have stayed if he hadn’t taped all his incriminating conversations."

Nixon ordered the break-in?! Who says that?!

I googled my question and came up with "Did Nixon really order the Watergate break-in?" a 2014 article by Timothy Noah (at MSNBC), which looked at a then-new book by John Dean, "The Nixon Defense: What He Knew and When He Knew It." MSNBC, John Dean... this is the anti-Nixon view:

Who ordered it? “There is no evidence,” Dean writes, “in all the Nixon-Watergate-related conversations that anyone in the White House had advance knowledge that Liddy was going into the Watergate.” By “evidence” Dean must mean “definitive evidence,” because he quotes Haldeman saying that setting up the espionage team for Nixon’s re-election had been the idea of campaign chief and former attorney general John Mitchell. “Mitchell,” Haldeman told Nixon several months later, “was pushing” for “[s]ecret papers, and financial data that [DNC Chairman Lawrence] O’Brien had, that he was going to get.”...

(In the Watergate tapes, Nixon repeatedly asks why and how the break-in occurred, but of course he alone knew that future generations were listening in. It’s also possible he couldn’t remember whether he’d ordered the break-in or not. Dean thinks Nixon was haunted by the possibility that he might have and then forgotten about it. Nixon was, after all, already in the break-ins business, having previously ordered the firebombing of the liberal Brookings Institution to steal some files – a yarn too rococo to detail here. Happily, that order was never carried out.)

Sullivan's "Nixon ordered the break-in" is — as they say — fake news. It was a bad analogy anyway, because Trump's open acknowledgement that he wanted Ukraine to investigate Biden is not the same as saying "I’m a crook," but by tossing in "Nixon ordered the break-in," Sullivan really makes a hash of it.

And I don't know if Sullivan wrote the headline — "Trump Is Begging to Be Impeached. Give Him What He Wants — Immediately" — but it carries a repulsive blaming-the-victim logic that he (and New York Magazine) should disown. Immediately. Somebody thinks that's funny and incisive, but it smells like the despicable response to rape and other physical violence: She was begging for it and got what she wanted.

The only other way to think of begging for it is in the Br'er Rabbit sense — that the seeming victim wants you to fall into a trap. And that can't be what Sullivan is thinking (though it may be what Trump is doing)?

"Trump always fights. He will fight it to the very end. After all he's stood up to, it's bizarre to think he won't stand his ground now."

"He's a showman, into the narrative, and if all his enemies take arms against him, he will know he's the star of this show. He won't slink off like Nixon. And Nixon had his own party turn on him. That hasn't happened to Trump yet, but even if the GOP turned on him, it wouldn't be the same as with Nixon, because the GOP was never really on his side. It just aligned with him when it served its interests. He will be an even more poignantly heroic protagonist if his own party turns on him, and his people will love him to the end."

That's something I wrote on Facebook, after someone suggested that the Democrats may be thinking that Trump will, like Nixon, resign.

Nixonian!

I keep hearing that word...



I hear: Ask not whether there was — technically, legalistically — a crime. Ask whether it feels like Nixon.

I'm hearing about the "exhausted majority." Is that something different from the old "silent majority"?

A lot of people — including me, here, yesterday — are linking to the Atlantic article, "Americans Strongly Dislike PC Culture" by Yascha Mounk.

I usually give the subtitle along with the title, but this article has a distractingly incomprehensible subtitle: "Youth isn’t a good proxy for support of political correctness, and race isn’t either." I mean, I can comprehend it now that I've read the article, but unlike most subtitles, it doesn't help you see what you're going to get by reading it. The use of the word "proxy" is, if not entirely wrong, entirely confusing. The idea is supposed to be that you're wrong if you assume that the older and whiter a person is there more likely they are to think "political correctness" is a problem. It turns out that all groups — except "progressive activists" — say they think "political correctness" is a problem. And the majorities are overwhelming.

The article draws from a new report, "Hidden Tribes: A Study of America’s Polarized Landscape,” which sorts Americans into various political "tribes." This depiction is a good quick summary:



Look at how many people are collected under the label "exhausted"! Obviously, we're a huge majority, and it's nice to see all the detail within the majority, but why are we all labeled "exhausted"? And why are "traditional liberals" said to be exhausted when "traditional conservatives" are not? The Atlantic article says that the views of the "traditional" and the "devoted" conservatives "are far outside the American mainstream." I guess the "traditional liberals," unlike the "traditional conservatives," don't belong in the "wings," and therefore get grouped with the "majority." But why is that entire diverse group, the majority, deemed "exhausted"?

To go to the underlying report:

In talking to everyday Americans, we have found a large segment of the population whose voices are rarely heard above the shouts of the partisan tribes. These are people who believe that Americans have more in common than that which divides them. While they differ on important issues, they feel exhausted by the division in the United States. They believe that compromise is necessary in politics, as in other parts of life, and want to see the country come together and solve its problems.

Is this group really tired or just hard to hear "above the shouts of the partisan tribes"? I suspect that the authors are using the term "exhausted majority" because they don't want to say "silent majority."

Here's the Wikipedia article for "Silent Majority":

"I don't want a Nixonian ending for Trump. He was pardoned by Ford and allowed to go to retirement. I want Trump prosecuted to whatever extent the law allows..."

"... both as punishment and by way of warning to others who would run for election, not to serve the country but to serve themselves."

That is the top-rated comment (by far) on a WaPo column by Joe Scarborough, "Trump is hurtling toward a Nixonian ending."

The commenter's name is "prairie fire," which can refer to several things, one of which is has to do with the Weather Underground:

The leading members of the Weather Underground (Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, Jeff Jones, and Celia Sojourn) collaborated on ideas and published a manifesto: Prairie Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism. The name came from a quote by Mao Zedong, "a single spark can set a prairie fire."....

The manifesto's influence initiated the formation of the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee in several American cities. Hundreds of above-ground activists helped further the new political vision of the Weather Underground. Essentially, after the 1969 failure of the Days of Rage to involve thousands of youth in massive street fighting, Weather renounced most of the Left and decided to operate as an isolated underground group. Prairie Fire urged people to never "dissociate mass struggle from revolutionary violence"....

According to Bill Ayers in the late 1970s, the Weatherman group further split into two factions — the May 19th Communist Organization and the Prairie Fire Collective — with Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers in the latter. The Prairie Fire Collective favored coming out of hiding and establishing an above-ground revolutionary mass movement....

That reminds me: Mitt Romney is predicting that Donald Trump will be "solidly" reelected in 2020:

"I think that not just because of the strong economy and the fact that people are going to see increasingly rising wages," Romney said, "but I think it's also true because I think our Democrat friends are likely to nominate someone who is really out of the mainstream of American thought and will make it easier for a president who's presiding over a growing economy."

Some people love Trump and some people hate Trump. Both help Trump. I wonder how many people are hoping the economy goes bad, that it would be worth it to get Trump. Meanwhile the lukewarm among us are hoping the Democrats keep calm, stick to the middle, and give us a blandly normal candidate.

And I should say it again: I think if Nixon were having his troubles within the present-day framework of new media, he wouldn't have to resign and the impeachment route would also fail.

"Did the president dump Comey for mishandling the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s email, as Trump and his team have said?"

"Or was Comey’s handling of the investigation simply a pretense to fire an independent-minded director who was investigating ties between Trump’s campaign and the Russians?"

That's how FiveThirtyEight frames the question.

Or would you say questions? I think it's one question if you see it as an either/or, which is what you will do if you think there are only 2 options. The second alternative is framed so strongly — "simply a pretense" — that it seems set up for rejection. I expect the answer to be it probably wasn't simply a pretense.

Now, let's read the article, which is by Perry Bacon Jr., who sees plenty of evidence that Comey indeed mishandled the Clinton email investigation. But if that were the real reason, why didn't the firing occur months ago? Trump had the basis for firing Comey, but he didn't pull the trigger. He just kept it in reserve, so doesn't that mean that he knew he could justify firing Comey and he waited until something else, something about him, not Clinton, made him want to be rid of the man?

The best answer to that is: Comey made a big mistake last week testifying before Congress (when he that Huma Abedin forwarded 1,000s of Hillary emails to Anthony Weiner). Bacon's response to that is hard to find. He switches to talking about how Democrats are criticizing Trump for firing Comey. But, of course, Democrats reflexively criticize Trump. They're calling him "Nixonian." A Republican Senator said he was "troubled" and another said there were "questions."

Bacon speculates that "the American people" might not believe Trump, but that's why I'm reading this article, Mr. Bacon. I thought you were going to answer the question why Trump did what he did, but now it seems you're only talking about whether people will believe Trump's assertion.

"Trump, citing no evidence, accuses Obama of ‘Nixon/Watergate’ plot to wiretap Trump Tower."

WaPo reports.

"Citing no evidence" doesn't mean he has no evidence. What happens next?

Trump offered no citations nor did he point to any credible news report to back up his accusation, but he may have been referring to commentary on Breitbart and conservative talk radio suggesting that Obama and his administration used “police state” tactics last fall to monitor the Trump team. The Breitbart story, published Friday, has been circulating among Trump's senior staff, according to a White House official who described it as a useful catalogue of the Obama administration's activities.

What's "credible news" these days? Maybe Trump is fighting fire with fire. The Russian business is a conspiracy theory so why not distract with a conspiracy theory on top of the conspiracy theory? There was a conspiracy to plant a conspiracy, etc. etc.

But Trump is accusing Obama of wiretapping his New York office. That's a very specific charge. Presumably Trump has high-level security within his homestead. Maybe something was detected. Here are Trump's tweets this morning:

1. "Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my 'wires tapped' in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!"

2. "Is it legal for a sitting President to be 'wire tapping' a race for president prior to an election? Turned down by court earlier. A NEW LOW!"

3. "I'd bet a good lawyer could make a great case out of the fact that President Obama was tapping my phones in October, just prior to Election!"

4. "How low has President Obama gone to tapp* my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!"

#3 feels vaguely like a threat to get a criminal investigation going against Obama. This is a big move by the art-of-the-deal master. Perhaps the goal is to get his attackers to stand down.
____________________

*"Tapp" would be a good name for an app.

ADDED: Meade is saying "You over-educated professional class elites, you don't understand TrumpTweet." Most important, he says, is that Trump put "wires tapped" and "wire tapping" in quotes and that misspelling "tapp" could have been intentional. Is it some figure of speech? Is there a special way of speaking within Twitter that the grownups don't understand?

If Omarosa didn't say "dossier," let's lob a new epithet: "Nixonian."

[POST TO COME. SORRY I ACCIDENTALLY PUBLISHED AFTER WRITING THE HEADLINE. CONCERNED THAT YOU MIGHT BE DISTRACTED BY IT ALREADY, I WON'T TAKE IT DOWN. THE BODY OF THE POST WILL ARRIVE SOON.]

I hate when that happens! There's some keystroke that publishes a post. I'm still not sure what it is, but I manage to hit it from time to time. Now, you're wondering what the hell this post title means. And the previous post title is enigmatic, so perhaps you think I've lost my mind.

Here are the 2 Washington Post articles I am reading:

1. From February 13th: "Journalist says Omarosa Manigault bullied her and mentioned a ‘dossier’ on her."

2. From February 14th (referring to the same juournalist, April Ryan): "‘This is . . . Nixonian’: Reporter was taped by White House in heated exchange."

Both articles are by Paul Farhi. The first article describes a dispute between Manigault and Ryan, and you can see that the headline highlights Ryan's version of the story. This is from the middle of Farhi's article:

In October, Manigault sent Ryan an email raising questions about whether Ryan was being paid by Hillary Clinton’s campaign — a claim Ryan vigorously denies. Manigault included a link to an article from the Intercept ["EXCLUSIVE: New Email Leak Reveals Clinton Campaign’s Cozy Press Relationship"]...

Ryan's name was in the Intercept article, and Manigault pushed Ryan to protect her "legacy" and "integrity."

Ryan said she was devastated by any intimation that she was unethical. “It’s just ugly,” she said. “She’s trying to harm my integrity and my career. I’ve been [covering the White House] for 20 years. I plan to be here for the next 20 years. You don’t mess with someone’s livelihood.”

I don't understand why Ryan is attacking Manigault for something that was in The Intercept. Was The Intercept right or wrong? Attacking Manigault makes it look like The Intercept got it right. Farhi doesn't explore that puzzlement. Here's his next paragraph:

During their altercation...

How did the "altercation" start? Suddenly, there's a face-to-face encounter? We're just plunged into the middle of things!

... Ryan said Manigault told her that she was among several African American journalists who were the subject of White House “dossiers.” Manigault has previously said that Trump is keeping “a list” of opponents, though at the time she was referring to Republicans who voted against Trump.

Ryan said she dismissed the idea of any such dossiers. “I said, ‘Good for you, good for you, good for you.’ ”...

What makes it into the headline is the idea of "dossiers." (An interesting word, given the fake-news Trump dossier of 4 weeks ago.) It sounds very creepy and scurrilous, the keeping of dossiers on journalists. Why it sounds... Nixonian.

One day later, the news is that the conversation was recorded and the word "dossier" isn't there. Ryan's story is shot to hell. And what's in the headline? Ryan's using the word "Nixonian" to describe the practice of recording conversations.

Ryan said she was not aware that her run-in with Manigault last week was recorded. “I didn’t know she was taping it,” she said. “This is about her trying to smear my name. This is freaking Nixonian.”

Manigault said the White House’s press staff recorded the encounter and that its contents make clear she never threatened Ryan or mentioned “dossiers.”

“She came in [to the White House press-staff area] hot,” hurling insults at her, Manigault said. “She came in with an attitude. For her to characterize me as the bully — I’m so glad we have this tape … because it’s ‘liar, liar, pants on fire’ ” in Ryan’s case, Manigault said.

It may be Nixonian to record conversations, but this incident shows it was smart, since it gives Manigault a way to defend herself.

Farhi tells us that Washington D.C. has a "one-party consent" law, which would mean that Manigault recording Ryan without her knowledge is not illegal, but:

Several veteran White House reporters said interviews are sometimes recorded by officials but that it was unheard of to do so without a reporter’s prior knowledge.

I'd like to hear more about the etiquette of recording. If it's done surreptitiously, that might explain why reporters do not hear of it. Maybe what's special in this case is how quickly Manigault offered the assertion of the existence of a recording to defend herself. One reason to do that would be if there actually is no recording and Manigault is simply trying to force Ryan into changing her story. But that's extremely unlikely given that Farhi writes that "a handful of reporters" have heard the recording. One of them, Fox News White House reporter John Roberts, said that he heard "some terse words and accusations... but it didn’t amount to a confrontation," and that he did not hear the word "dossier."

Ryan stood by her account and charged that Manigault “selected pieces” of their exchange. “She wants to spin it like it’s a catfight, but she edited that tape,” she said. “You don’t hear her screaming. This is about her smearing me.”

And that's where we stand. Ryan got some big press and now she's on the defensive. Why did The Washington Post help her go on the offensive on February 13th and then again boost her on the 14th, calling Manigault "Nixonian"? When does Manigault get fair balance in The Washington Post? 

"Attorneys for Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl said Saturday they may seek a deposition from presidential contender Donald Trump..."

"... or call him as a witness at a legal proceeding, saying they fear his comments could affect their client's right to a fair trial."

What Trump said — showing a clumsy feel for the rule of law — was that Bergdahl is a "traitor, a no-good traitor, who should have been executed."

This takes me back to 1970, when the headline read: "President Nixon may have freed Charles Manson-not by an act of executive clemency, but by one of errant stupidity."

What Nixon said was "Here is a man who was guilty, directly or indirectly, of eight murders without reason." Manson's response was: "Here's a man who is accused of hundreds of thousands of murders, accusing me of being accused of eight murders."

Here's David Brinkley reporting it in the soberly black-and-white serioso tones of the past:

Trump wants "to be unpredictable, because, you know, we need unpredictability. Everything is so predictable with our country."

That's his clever answer in case you're looking for specifics about anything he can't or doesn't want to answer, as stated on "Fox News Sunday" this morning when Chris Wallace asked him about how he'd use the debt limit. Pushed, he used the magic word again: "I do not want to say that because I want to show unpredictability. You have to. You can't just go around and say that." What a concept! It reminded me of Nixon's secret plan to end the Vietnam War back in 1968, but Meade said Nixon never said he had a "secret plan." That was how his opponent's put it, mocking him. So Trump isn't like Nixon in that respect. He's getting out ahead of his opponents. It can't be mockery or he's self-mocking. It's a mockery inoculation, an inmockulation.

Later, in the panel discussion, WaPo's Charles Lane said about exactly what I had been thinking:

... I found myself smiling, and laughing at times at his performance, and feeling very entertained, but when I actually read the transcript of it, right, and looked at the actual words coming out of his mouth, none of it made any sense.  He said we have too much predictability in this country.  I want to be unpredictable.  Well, that is a new campaign slogan, right?  Vote for me, who knows what I'll do in the White House?  I mean, the next minute after he says how great it is to be unpredictable, he says we absolutely must defund Planned Parenthood.  Right?  He waffled on affirmative action.  That's an issue that has been out there many years.  It's a fully digested issue in the political system. Lots of people have a position on that, one way or another.  Not Donald Trump, who wants to be the leader of the conservative party in this country.  So it is this incredible disconnect between the affect, and the demeanor and the show that he puts on, and the actual substance behind it, which I insist is still lacking....

I guess from Trump's point of view, Lane is lagging, not getting it, thrown off by all that wonderful unpredictability that we need so much. Americans don't want details, we want unpredictability.

What echoed in my head as I wrote that last sentence was: I don’t want realism. I want magic! Yes, yes, magic!



I try to give that to people. I misrepresent things to them. I don’t tell the truth, I tell what ought to be truth. And if that is sinful, then let me be damned for it! – Don’t turn the light on!