Richard nixon

The pundits and political professionals of Washington, DC have never had a very good understanding of the Republican party. They hate its conservative and populist elements, and they only know how to evaluate the prospects of those elements using irrelevant criteria, like a chess club judging a basketball team – only it’s the political right that’s more cerebral than the dead center. It doesn’t matter how many times the conventional opinion is dead wrong. The Republican right was supposed to be humiliated, broken and vanquished for good after Barry Goldwater’s landslide loss to Lyndon Johnson in 1964. And then again after Richard Nixon resigned in disgrace a decade later. Donald Trump, of course, was totally unelected in 2016.

In the last five years of his life, when I knew Richard Nixon, nothing described him better than Milton’s “calm of mind, all passion spent.” During the most tumultuous political career in American history he had come back many times, but the greatest comeback of all was in full swing. His enemies had seized control of the puritanical conscience of America to slay him, unjustly, and he was manipulating the same national conscience, which was founded on Plymouth Rock and has survived all the corruption and hypocrisy and violence of American public life, and when aroused, is insuperable. Since his political fall, and later his death, polls increasingly indicate public unease about the treatment of Richard Nixon.

On Tuesday, President Trump dropped a bomb – not a bunker-buster but the F-bomb. Talking to the press about Israel and Iran, he said, “We have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing.” There is a lot to say about this statement – starting with the implied moral equivalence between the two countries. But let’s focus on the F-bomb. Has a president ever before used this word in public? Used it deliberately, in a public statement? Trump seems to have recorded a first. Plenty of presidents have had salty tongues. You may know a story about Harry and Bess Truman. It is quaint now. There are several versions of this story, but, essentially, it goes like this. Mr.

From the moment you enter Donald J. Trump’s Oval Office, you are surrounded, not by staff or Secret Service, but by presidents. In his second term, he has chosen to envelop himself in Americana to an unprecedented degree. He faces Franklin D. Roosevelt whenever he sits at his desk. Looking back are Teddy Roosevelt, Lincoln, McKinley, Polk, Jackson, Jefferson, and alone among them as a non-president, Franklin. Ronald Reagan looks over his shoulder for every decision he makes. “We took them out of the vaults. We have incredible vaults of things,” he tells me. “They have 3,900 paintings.” It’s a roster of the greatest American leaders assembled in an oval around him in their most sterling depictions. They serve as motivation.

Despite the sharp polarization of American politics, there is surprising agreement on what went wrong with capitalism. Whether the writer or politician is coming at this question from the left or right, the blame often falls on four decades of “small government” ideology and free market orthodoxy since Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Whether the flaw in question is slowing productivity growth, the rise of oligopolies, the export of jobs, or income and wealth inequality, its source is traced to excessive faith in the “magic of the market.” Capitalism’s flaws are “market failures.” The problem: this narrative is wrong on the facts.

Welcome to Thunderdome. The essential divide between Republican insiders on how to attack Kamala Harris is stuck, swinging back and forth between the question of inauthentic climber or authentic leftist. Is she an untrustworthy chameleon who was against fracking before she was for it? Or is she a San Francisco Democrat elitist who was the furthest senator to the left? When the George W. Bush re-elect had to tangle with John Kerry, they went the unreliable flip-flopper route — something Chris LaCivita is very familiar with as the then-media advisor to Swift Boat Veterans for Truth — to great success.

One of the advantages of not having been born yesterday is the ability to recognize certain trends of the news cycle when they come around again. Am I alone in thinking that every major American political manifesto since about 1848 has made a promise of reducing the taxation burden on its hardworking citizens, for example? Or that for Brits, like me, of a certain age (sixty-eight), our whole lives have been spent in the shadow of a stale and still unresolved debate about the nation’s place in Europe? More recently, I was struck by a sense of déjà vu all over again when comparing the final meltdown in Joe Biden’s White House to the events preceding Richard Nixon’s departure from office fifty years ago. The case for presidential history repeating itself isn’t hard to make.

What is decadence? In popular usage, it is synonymous with “excess,” especially of a sensual or appetitive nature. I am not sure what it means that we encounter the word most often these days in connection highly caloric chocolate confections. Perhaps such linguistic degradation, in which serious things are reformulated in an atmosphere of ironic depreciation, is one sign we live in a decadent age. In any case, at its core I believe that decadence has less to do with excessive consumption or sensuality than with ontological attenuation.   What does that pretentious mouthful mean? It means that decadence is essentially about the hollowing out of vital institutions, not their surrender to gluttony, lust and profligacy.

Article II, Section Four, of the Constitution provides that “The President, Vice President, and all civil Officers of the United States shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” Other sections give the House of Representatives the sole power of impeachment and the Senate the power to try impeachments and to convict with a two-thirds vote of senators present. But impeachment has been very rarely used in this country. Indeed the House has voted to impeach a federal official only twenty-one times in the 234 years the Constitution has been in effect.  No official has ever been accused of treason and only three of bribery, all federal judges.

Mike Pence was never likely to win the Republican nomination for president, and today he recognized the inevitable. He withdrew from the race. Now is not the time to focus on why his candidacy never gained traction. It is the time to remember his great contribution to our nation on January 6, 2021. On that fateful day, Pence did the right thing, despite enormous pressure from Donald Trump and a rioting mob to do the wrong one. He resisted that pressure at great risk to his political future and personal safety. He deserves our praise and gratitude. On January 6, Pence was presiding over the Senate as the electoral votes for president were counted. The duty was a limited, constitutional role assigned to the vice president.

Last September, when 60 Minutes asked Joe Biden what he thought of the August raid at Mar-a-Lago where the FBI found folders of classified documents mixed in with Donald Trump’s personal effects and papers, the president said he was shocked. Biden wanted to know how “anyone could be that irresponsible.” He worried about what sources and methods might have been compromised by his predecessor’s carelessness. Were there agent lists among those purloined records? That bit of political point-scoring has become a petard with which the president has hoist himself. Two months later, Biden’s lawyers found classified documents in his Wilmington home and garage and in his personal office at the Penn Biden Center in Washington.

In the final year of Donald Trump’s presidency, I went to an event at the AFI Silver Theater and Cultural Center in Washington’s Maryland suburbs. The occasion wasn’t a film but an evening with Bob Woodward. He talked about the lessons of Watergate and what it was like to chase down all, or at least most, of the president’s men. He was, however, pretty coy when it came to talking about the big reveals he would make in an upcoming book about the Trump presidency. “Follow the money,” he winked. He intimated that there would be big revelations about Trump and Russia. What they might be he never said. The reverential crowd of several hundred Washingtonians was ready to burn incense at his feet. But the oracle simply refused to deliver.