Via Drudge: In times of unexpected strife, the aggrieved seek comfort anywhere they can find it, like trees trying to grow on the side of cliffs. Since Donald Trump’s election, dejected liberals have sought catharsis in tears, in marches, in late-night comedy, in essays about reasons that marches occurred. But none of those things have changed the fact that Trump is the president.
We’re now entering a new phase in liberal self-soothing: the calming Nixon-expert-with-a-crystal-ball phase.
This week’s New York magazine cover story, written by Frank Rich, lays hard into the Trump-Nixon tie, offering history as balm. “The resistance” needn’t worry just yet. Just wait, Rich urges. “Watergate auto-da-fé wasn’t built in a day.”
Rich isn’t alone in his Trump-Watergate fantasy. It’s hard to avoid drawing some parallels between Tricky Dick and Teflon Don.
Like Trump, Richard Nixon’s Congress was stocked with allies. Nixon taped people (Trump, thus far, only lies about it). Nixon had Deep Throat, an aggrieved FBI guy, and Trump has James Comey, an aggrieved FBI guy. Nixon, like Trump, hated the press and loved his daughters and had a strange relationship with his wife.
The next part of the story, the fantasy goes, ends happily for the opposition. In Nixon’s case, journalists grabbed a thread and kept pulling. And within two years of his election, a president who had logged a record popular vote was quite literally peacing out of the White House.
Rich argues that Trump’s TBD-gate is unfolding at a comparable rate to Watergate. “You will find reason to hope that the 45th president’s path through scandal may wind up at the same destination as the 37th’s—a premature exit from the White House in disgrace—on a comparable timeline.”
Is it possible that Trump’s presidency will end in Nixonian disgrace? Sure. But there’s a much greater likelihood that it won’t, that Rich’s prediction will age about as well as Van Jones’ March 1 proclamation that Donald Trump “became president last night,” or Fareed Zakaria’s proclamation on April 7 that Donald Trump “became president last night.” If Trump somehow lurches through four or eight years, history will view the left’s starry-eyed Watergate dreams as in the same genre of smug as Clinton acolytes’ cockiness going into the final stretch of the 2016 presidential campaign. Litanies of Trump-Nixon comparisons amount to little more than fantasy, wastes of precious time that could have been better used on reality.
Donald Trump is not Richard Nixon, and 1973 is not 2017.
We’re now entering a new phase in liberal self-soothing: the calming Nixon-expert-with-a-crystal-ball phase.
This week’s New York magazine cover story, written by Frank Rich, lays hard into the Trump-Nixon tie, offering history as balm. “The resistance” needn’t worry just yet. Just wait, Rich urges. “Watergate auto-da-fé wasn’t built in a day.”
Rich isn’t alone in his Trump-Watergate fantasy. It’s hard to avoid drawing some parallels between Tricky Dick and Teflon Don.
Like Trump, Richard Nixon’s Congress was stocked with allies. Nixon taped people (Trump, thus far, only lies about it). Nixon had Deep Throat, an aggrieved FBI guy, and Trump has James Comey, an aggrieved FBI guy. Nixon, like Trump, hated the press and loved his daughters and had a strange relationship with his wife.
The next part of the story, the fantasy goes, ends happily for the opposition. In Nixon’s case, journalists grabbed a thread and kept pulling. And within two years of his election, a president who had logged a record popular vote was quite literally peacing out of the White House.
Rich argues that Trump’s TBD-gate is unfolding at a comparable rate to Watergate. “You will find reason to hope that the 45th president’s path through scandal may wind up at the same destination as the 37th’s—a premature exit from the White House in disgrace—on a comparable timeline.”
Is it possible that Trump’s presidency will end in Nixonian disgrace? Sure. But there’s a much greater likelihood that it won’t, that Rich’s prediction will age about as well as Van Jones’ March 1 proclamation that Donald Trump “became president last night,” or Fareed Zakaria’s proclamation on April 7 that Donald Trump “became president last night.” If Trump somehow lurches through four or eight years, history will view the left’s starry-eyed Watergate dreams as in the same genre of smug as Clinton acolytes’ cockiness going into the final stretch of the 2016 presidential campaign. Litanies of Trump-Nixon comparisons amount to little more than fantasy, wastes of precious time that could have been better used on reality.
Donald Trump is not Richard Nixon, and 1973 is not 2017.
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5 comments:
Rich forgets character counts.
Nixon made his own troubles.
So did one of Rich's wet dreams, Willie.
It is all boring now.
In Watergate an actual CRIME had been committed, which allowed the charge of obstruction of justice to be laid. Here there has been NO PROOF of ANY kind of crime whatsoever, hence much of what Meuller is doing is an illegal overreach.
Trying WAY too hard to make Trump be "like Nixon."
More honest title: "Liberal Impeachment Fantasies are No Longer Helpful"
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