The Donald’s sly hint of a White House taping system a few weeks back was enough to cast a nostalgic aura of excitement over the nation’s capital. Those of us in the political junkie geezerhood delight in finding Watergate imagery in the growing muck of Trump’s folderol. Our blissfully aging crowd, after all, remembers only too well how Tricky Dick hoisted himself on the petard of his own surreptitious recording system, an electronic treasure trove of every syllable uttered in the Oval Office, some slurred beyond recognition.
Nixon’s own tapes brought him down, but more importantly, they were a gift that kept on giving. For decades to come, transcripts and MP3 files of virtually every private presidential conversation in the Nixon White House were periodically released. The final installment – 340 hours of tape – was made public in 2013. As a result, we were treated to the horrifying-but-compelling opportunity to see the unvarnished version of the 37th president, long after his death. It was not pretty.
For example, this Nixon gem from a 1971 Oval Office diatribe: “The Mexicans are a different cup of tea. At the present time they steal, they’re dishonest, but they do have some concept of family life.” (As opposed to the “Negros,” Nixon went on to postulate, “who shun conventional family life.”) Now, that’s obviously not the public persona any sane political operative would want to advance, thus the beauty of the Nixon tapes. They let us eavesdrop on the private utterances of a president, it turned out, we barely knew. So when Trump teased that the FBI director he had just fired better hope there were no tapes of their conversations, many of us lit up over the prospect of a whole new batch of presidential recordings.
Alas, another dream shattered. Trump later said he had no such tapes, although he left the door slightly ajar, saying that someone else might have wiretapped his office. Obama, maybe. Then again, it doesn’t matter. You don’t need a hidden tape recorder to know the real Donald Trump. All you have to do is follow him on Twitter or listen to his rally speeches. This is a man who captured the presidency by shouting and tweeting the kind of crude, profane, hateful stuff other politicians wouldn’t whisper to a trusted aide. Nixon had been dead for 20 years before the world heard his less-than-generous thoughts about Mexicans. We knew where Trump stood on that issue way before he became president. Here’s what he tweeted in June of 2015: “Druggies, drug dealers, rapists and killers are coming across the southern border.”
We learned in 2001 that Nixon, 30 years earlier, had made it clear to his staff that he did not want women in important jobs. Here’s his private remark: “I’m not for women, frankly, in any job. I don’t want them around. Thank God we don’t have any in the Cabinet.” Trump, on the other hand, came to the White House with an exceedingly transparent position on women. In addition to boasting about his proclivity for grabbing them by their lady parts, there is this analytical tweet from 2013: “The Miss Universe Women totally blow away the Victoria’s Secret Women.” Trump hasn’t placed many women in his cabinet, but he sure packed his swim suit competition with them.
Presidents, of course, serve as the country’s military commander in chief, and have to make many tough decisions with respect to warcraft. Rarely, however, do they speak about the loss of life and limb in crude “locker room” fashion. So, there was shock when the Nixon tapes relayed the president’s reaction to a report that a million pounds of bombs had been dropped on North Vietnam: “A million pounds of bombs! Goddamn, that must have been a good strike. I tell you the thing to do is pour it in there every place we can…just bomb the hell out of them.” No need to wait for the posthumous release of secret Trump tapes to hear the Donald’s lack of elegance in describing military strategy. He spent most of the campaign boasting about his desire to “bomb the shit out of ISIS.”
And then there are the courts, a not infrequent nemesis for the executive branch. Yet, out of respect for the founders’ notion of separation of powers, presidents typically refrain from publicly attacking the judicial branch. Thanks to the Nixon tapes, however, we eventually learned of his reaction to a Supreme Court decision denying the government’s request to stop the New York Times from publishing the “Pentagon Papers”, classified documents detailing serious military mistakes in the Vietnam War. Said Nixon at the time: “. . . I was so damn mad when the Supreme Court had to come down. Unbelievable, wasn’t it? You know, those clowns we got on there, I tell you, I hope I outlive the bastards.” Trump, of course, has never hidden his disdain for judges, particularly those who rule against him. During the campaign, he called a judge assigned to a suit involving Trump University a “hater” and a “Mexican”. As president, he tweeted this about one of the judges who ruled against him on his travel ban: “Just cannot believe a judge would put our country in such peril. If something happens blame him and court system. People pouring in. Bad!”
This Nixon-Trump story of then and now has two morals. One is that, in this great country of ours, every child has the opportunity to become president when they grow up, no matter how uncouth, obstinate or unbalanced they may be. Secondly, we have finally evolved to the point that we can observe our president’s abhorrent behavior in real time. No need to wait for 30-year-old tapes to find out he was nuts.