Tricky Dick and Dirty Don

As soon as the impeachment of President Trump passed through the house, comparisons to the 1974 impeachment of Richard Nixon began to surface.

Headlines have read “Nixon was Bad. Trump is Worse”, and “ Trump Comparisons aren’t fair to Nixon”.

Just for reference let’s look at some of the comparisons being made about the two presidents. Nixon tried to squash federal investigations into his campaign, and so has Trump. Nixon dangled pardons to keep witnesses from fully testifying, and so has Trump. Nixon refused to respond to congressional subpoenas, and so has Trump. 

Beverly Gage, an American-history professor, discussed the Nixon impeachment proceedings and parallels with the Trump-Ukraine scandal in a an article with The New Yorker in September of 2019.

Recalling historical precedents regarding the battle between the bureaucracy and the White House and Presidential misbehavior.

“ I think the obvious reference point to a lot of what is going on today is Watergate, because we have some of the same factors at work. But I think we can also trace a history in which some of the political consequences of Watergate are actually continuing to shape what we are seeing playing out in the Trump Presidency: both the reforms that came out of Watergate to the fact that we have intelligence committees at all-and also some of the political narrative that came out of the moment, such as Republican sense of victimization and some of the Nixonian narratives about liberals and the press. We are seeing real echoes of that “.

Source: How Watergate Set the Stage for the Trump Impeachment Inquiry

Trump himself pointed out what might be the critical difference between him and Nixon that would negate all the other parallels “ He Left. I don’t Leave. A big difference. I don’t leave,” the president told reporters.

House lawmakers called managers who will prosecute the impeachment case against President Trump carried the articles of impeachment to the Senate on January 15th, to formally begin the third trial of a sitting president. The trial is set to begin on Tuesday January 21st.