"To the last, I will grapple with thee ... from Hell's heart, I stab at thee! For hate's sake, I spit my last breath at thee!" -- Khan, Star Trek II
Is Trump Nixon’s revenge? Mark Schmitt of Vox did a great post in 2020 on the subject. Five years later, it seems even more evident now than then. Trump’s bull-in-a-china-shop style of dealing with international organizations calls to mind not so much Andrew Jackson or William McKinley, whose comparisons he has already drawn from many historians. Rather, Trump resembles more starkly the 37th President of the United States, Richard Millhouse Nixon, another man of profound resentments against the liberal elite, but who climbed the social ladder to become President.
At the outset let me say that the parallels between Trump’s “liberation day” and the Nixon shock of 1971 are naught else but striking. Nixon at the time applied tariffs against Japan like a bludgeon, in order to force a revaluation of the Yen (sound familiar?). Nixon also distressed the previously existing Bretton Woods monetary order in a manner comparable to the way Trump has disrupted markets with his tariff-obsession. Nixon hit our neighbor and ally, Canada, with tariffs, wielded against our European allies. And the creation of the euro stems directly from the economic shockwaves caused by those same tariffs. Further, Nixon also pressured Fed Chair Arthur Burns in a way not dissimilar to how Trump punches at current Fed Chair Jerome Powell.
Hew van Steenis wrote of the similarities for FT:
Certainly recent events share some hallmarks with the “Nixon shock”, which occurred when the then president took the dollar off the gold standard, implemented a 10 per cent import tariff and introduced temporary price controls. This de-anchoring of the regime resulted in a period of global economic instability and uncertainty. It not only caused a loss in business confidence but led to stagflation. Nixon’s price and wage controls spectacularly backfired, triggering product shortages and helping to fuel a wage-price spiral. The whole episode was a pivotal contributor to the huge inflation of the ’70s. As with Trump’s tariffs, Nixon’s were introduced to cudgel countries into changing the terms of trade to help reduce the US trade deficit. His biggest concerns were Japan and Germany. “My philosophy, Mr. President, is that all foreigners are out to screw us and it’s our job to screw them first,” Treasury secretary John Connally had said to him.
“History repeats itself, first as a tragedy, second as a farce,” said Marx, a man hated by both Trump and Nixon, but probably never understood. We cannot fail to note though that President Trump sounded most Nixonesque when under siege during the Russiagate investigation. There, Trump’s rhetoric and Nixon’s in the thick of Watergate were in full confluence. Both Woodward and Bernstein, chroniclers of Nixon’s final days, spoke at the time on the similarities. Trump and Nixon ultimately fired the people in charge of those respective investigations. “In Trump’s firing of Comey, Echoes of Nixon,” was the New York Times headline at the time.
The similarities continue, particularly in the ways that both Presidents strategically divide the nation in order to conquer. Nixon initially rejected, but then found common cause with a paranoid right-wing extremist group. And as is the paranoid style of American politics, movements like the John Birchers, over the decades, evolved into a slattern QAnonsense. Trump was only too happy to absorb them into his own movement. On culture wars, particularly, Trump was adept at communicating to the “silent majority,” a rhetorical device held in common by both Presidents. At a campaign rally on July 11, 2015, in Phoenix, Arizona, Trump told the audience that "the silent majority is back, and we're going to take our country back.”
What is this silent majority to which both refer? Historian Rick Perlstein, author of Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America and The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan, told NPR: "It comes deeply from Richard Nixon's basic political orientation." So far as anyone can tell, it entered the public vocabulary in a speech Nixon gave on Nov. 3, 1969, defending the Vietnam War as opposition against it was rising. Nixon framed the Vietnam War against the protesters attending the demonstrations. From NPR:
“The ‘noisy minority," as Perlstein called it, was fairly large. "It was black civil rights militants," he said. "It was feminists who were supposedly burning their bras. It was students who were smoking drugs. It was rock 'n' roll bands. It was everything that threatened that kind of 1950s Leave It to Beaver vision of what America was like before everything literally and figuratively went to pot."
Around the same timeframe, Nixon wanted Teamsters to attack protesters in public. To paraphrase Tupac Shakur: Thug Lyf! Nearly a half century later, Trump mused that he might pay the legal fees of a man that was arrested for sucker-punching a protester at his rally in 2016. “The man got carried away,” Trump said on NBC’s Meet The Press Sunday. “He obviously loves his country, and maybe he doesn’t like seeing what’s happening to the country.” Obstruction of justice and abuse of power are other features held in common by both 37 and 47. The 37th President led us into a major Constitutional crisis with Watergate. And a recent Elon University poll found that two-thirds of Americans fear a Constitutional crisis between Trump and the Courts.
Both Presidencies have been positively obsessed with elites, from the ivy league to the now-embattled media Establishment. Trump has gone to war against colleges, despite the fact that according to the Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2025, 72% of the world's top 25 universities are in the United States. His reason for “breaking the wheel” of the elite capture of universities is — mirabile dictu! — to rescue academia from the cancer of “woke.”
Attacking elite universities is a cynical ploy, to be sure, but one not without some possibility of political success. Such is the nature of Trump’s thuggery. Strategically, this catches Democrats on the back foot, defending an institution as philanthropically well-fed as Harvard. As Johanna Alonso put it in Higher Education just days after the 2024 election:
Over all, college graduates—which, in the exit polls conducted by Edison Research in collaboration with the National Election Pool, means individuals with a bachelor’s or advanced degree—made up 43 percent of the electorate this year. Of that group, 55 percent voted for Vice President Kamala Harris and 42 percent voted for Donald Trump. The numbers were almost exactly reversed among those who hadn’t graduated college, 42 percent of whom voted for Harris and 56 percent of whom voted for Trump.
Though clearly illegal, going after Harvard’s tax-exempt status could possibly bestow some populist chic. Or not. Who knows? Many Americans still harbor a resentment against Harvard, as irrational as that may sound. Nixon’s distaste for Harvard probably goes back to being accepted with a scholarship, but having to remain in his hometown of Whittier, California to mind the store and help his family after his brother, Harold, became tubercular. Those feelings probably did not improve any when the effortlessly smooth Harvard graduate JFK narrowly defeated him for the Presidency in 1960. Trump’s negative fixation on Harvard, however, is more difficult to discern, other than the fact that it is just good politics for him. There is no evidence — despite online claims — that his son, Barron was rejected by Harvard.
This is just plain good politics for Trump because it leaves the Democrat party, which lost voters making under $50k a year, in the odd position of championing the nation’s oldest, wealthiest and influential college. Founded before the American republic was established, Harvard has an endowment larger than the GDP of Jordan. This is not — to put it lightly — a formula for regaining non-college voters lost in 2024. It is the perfect “Trump Trap,” against which I argued about a week ago. Very difficult to escape from once it closes round your windpipe. Though it should be noted that a recent Yahoo News/YouGov survey found that more Americans disapprove (49%) than approve (35%) of Trump’s excessive pressure. Short-fingered, vulgarian overreach? Time will tell …
But it goes beyond — yet through — Harvard. “The establishment is the enemy,” cooed Nixon on his infamous tapes. Was this sober Nixon? “The professors are the enemy. Professors are the enemy. Write that on a blackboard 100 times and never forget it.” Vice President J.D.Vance, at the National Conservatism Conference in 2021, echoed the former President. "We have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country. The professors are the enemy."
And not just the professors, but even the education-adjacent institutions. Last week, President Trump signed an EO directing the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to "cease federal funding for NPR and PBS." Fifty-six years ago, Nixon tried to do something similar, drawing the ire of the normally unflappable Mr. Rogers. But this strategy might backfire, as PBS and NPR, unlike Harvard, are full ride scholarships with 100-percent acceptance rates.
The similarities between the Trump and Nixon administration’s do not end there. Nor does the impression that Trump is somehow channeling Tricky Dick’s ghost; that it animates his administration from some nether astral dimension. Particularly when it barrels through Impeachments, shamelessly (and gets away with it).
The similarities between the two administrations, of course, are not exact. Trump and Nixon disagree profoundly on China policy. Still, Trump is trying to disentangle the relationship between Russia and China, though he’s doing so by voluntarily moving America into Putin’s orbit. he recognizes the framework of Nixinger in China, but is choosing the alternative path. And Trump, occurring further down the timeline, is obviously more extreme and anti-establishment and outwardly pro-authoritarian than Nixon. John Dean, Nixon's White House counsel, thinks that Trump is Nixon “on stilts and steroids.” Further, he told The Guardian:
“Nixon, who was very bright and understood how the government operated and what the levers of power really are was somebody who also could experience shame and accepted the rule of law. When the supreme court ruled against him, that was it. I can’t imagine, in a similar situation, Trump complying with a court order from the supreme court saying turn over your tapes.”
Dean believed that Nixon loved his Quaker mother deeply and was devoted to fulfilling his promise to her of “world peace.” If that is so, he went about doing so in an appalling manner. Still, Trump had no such endearing or enduring a quality. All that Trump inherited from his mother was, quite frankly, cruelty as well as an obsession with the British royal family. Nixon’s “Enemies List” appears to be the first historical iteration of Trump’s retribution project. From John J. Edwards III on History.com:
Among Richard Nixon’s many presidential priorities—ending the Vietnam War, thawing relations with China, expanding environmental protections—there was one initiative his team hoped to keep well under the radar: his secret “enemies list.” In an August 1971 memo, White House Counsel John Dean offered a piquant summary of the project’s goal: to “use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies.”
The formal list began in June 1971as a short memo of 20 names of people, most of whom had deep ties to the Democratic Party. Actor Paul Newman made an appearance, with the notation “Radic-Lib causes. Heavy Mc Carthy involvement in '68.” So did Washington Post columnist Mary McGrory, cited for her “daily hate Nixon articles.” The list would grow into several unwieldy compendiums, totaling hundreds of names, encompassing politicians, media figures, celebrities, labor leaders, activists, watchdog groups, scholars and businesspeople.
In closing, Trump must get a kick out of the notion that he, a man so influenced by Nixon, so despised by the cultural elite, now has a Kennedy on-call in his administration. And at the bargain price of HHS! Trump didn’t even have to give away a really high-status position, like State or Treasury or Defense — or even (gasp) Vice President! Trump got a Kennedy for a bargain price of a portfolio that he couldn’t give a whit about. How is that for the Art of the Deal? As a Trump observer of two decades, it is impossible to imagine Trump, his broken psyche the way that it is, not laughing at his good fortune to score a private audience with the King of England, as his mother would have loved. Or in the delight at being the boss of a Kennedy, despite remaining a creature of the far-right. Although there have never been any recorded evidence of Trump actually having a real, authentic laugh in public, it is difficult to imagine him not doing so in the quiet of his room with his Diet Coke and Adderall at the way things all turned out after all.
And the ghost of Nixon, in the shadowy ethers, joining in.
“For the last ten years, the extremely online fascist fanboys and their big dogs in bigger media have been inserting lies about the Nazis and Hitler into the American low-attention mainstream. Last year, Tucker Carlson and Joe Rogan both hosted World War II revisionist Darryl Cooper, who argues that Churchill, not Hitler, caused the Second World War. Last year, after his platforming of Cooper drew outrage, Carlson himself went on Piers Morgan’s blovia-thon and whined: ‘So people want to tell me Churchill’s an incredible guy. Really? Well, why didn’t he save Western civilization?’ For the new Roman-saluting right, the definition of saving Western civilization is apparently not eradicating a fascist regime that practiced industrial-scale ethnic genocide and kicked off a war that killed 70 to 85 million people around the world. In their view, the end of the pre-World War II order and the defeat of a viciously white supremacist regime led directly to the current migration crises. To them, the blending of humans in the modern world, upended by climate change and by George W Bush’s insane Iraq war, and with a deeply interconnected global economy and advanced transportation, is the actual end of ‘western civilization.’” (Nina Burleigh/American Freakshow)
“This public media tug-of-war is not just happening at the federal level. In Indiana, Republicans in the general assembly erased state funding for NPR and PBS affiliates "in the final hours of its budget session last month," giving station advocates no time to respond. Now ‘the 17 public media outlets across the state are having talks about how to weather the funding crisis,’ the Chicago Tribune reports. ‘Rural areas with fewer viewers and less resources could be hit the hardest.’ WFYI, the NPR and PBS brand in Indianapolis, has an excellent and impartial piece about the local impacts here... >> MSNBC's Zeeshan Aleem says the defunding effort is ‘straight out of the authoritarian playbook — and comes at a time of acute distress in the media market.’ >> Professor A.J. Bauer says NPR and PBS, ‘with their journalistic and educational programming,’ are ‘even more crucial in a media landscape now full of platforms that aren't committed to facts.’” (Brian Stelter/Reliable Sources)
“I arrived home to an invitation for a dinner Diane von Fürstenberg was giving for my close friend Sue Mengers, the funny and feisty big-time agent who handled lots of stars. Sue was then the prime leader of Hollywood social life. I immediately declined. Diane von Fürstenberg’s apartment was the last place I wanted to go. Outraged, Sue Mengers called me and said, ‘How could you not come to a dinner being given for me?’ I said, ‘I’m not coming. I don’t like that woman.’ Sue said, ‘Of course you’re coming. It’s a dinner for me, and it has nothing to do with how you feel about her.’ She added, ‘It would be too insulting if the top movie person in New York didn’t show up at a dinner for the top agent in the world.’ So I went.” (Barry Diller/NYMag)