Politico’s chief foreign affairs columnist Susan Glasser said it would be unfair to former President Richard Nixon to compare him to President Donald Trump in an article Monday.
Glasser blasts Trump throughout the piece, claiming he’s worse than Nixon and that the two are an unfair comparison. The article is based on an interview with Elizabeth Drew, known for writing the “Washington Journal,” a diary of how America handled the Nixon investigations in 1973 and 1974 before his impeachment.
Glasser and Drew continued to agree throughout the interview, bringing up Trump’s difficulties as president, although it has only been a little over seven months since he took office.
“Richard Nixon is already the inescapable analogy of the Trump era. And inevitably, the magazine articles and essays, radio talk shows and book lists all mention a single remarkable work: Elizabeth Drew’s Washington Journal,” Glasser wrote. “Six months into Donald Trump’s already embattled presidency, references to the disgraced 37th president are everywhere.”
Glasser mentioned how Nixon and people involved in his scandals have recently been brought back into the spotlight due to the “similarities” between the two presidents.
“Former Watergate prosecutors are suddenly ubiquitous talking heads on cable TV. Google ‘Nixon and Trump’ and more than 14 million references pop up.” Drew’s “Washington Journal” has had an “unlikely renaissance” since Trump, Glasser said.
The president has “has done wonders for that book,” Drew said.
Glasser asked Drew if her book on Nixon was actually relevant to the Trump investigations and discussions of 2016 Russia election hacking.
“Are we right to analogize the tarnished ending of the two-term Nixon presidency—with its historic accomplishments, as well as sordid tapes and long list of criminal convictions—with a chaos-engulfed Trump presidency that has not even been able to staff up, has no significant legislative wins to its name and is already, at just six months in as of this week, the most unpopular in seven decades?” Glasser asked.
“I think we already have an obstruction of justice, certainly as an impeachable offense,” Drew said. Trump “is a running crisis. The crisis is the president and his presidency.” Drew continued, saying Watergate was “not a simple detective story” about a break-in. It was instead a “constitutional crisis” involving “a whole array of abuse of power, where they used the instruments of government against Nixon’s perceived enemies—and he was very good at perceiving enemies.”
Drew said the biggest difference between Trump and Nixon is that Nixon was smarter, “he read books and cared about policy.”
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