12/27/2023 0 Comments Trump in panic modeThere has been plenty of great investigative journalism during the last four years. There would be some cosmic irony in all this. I don’t know if it will indict reporters, but I wonder if it will be the swan song of Woodward. Whereas Nixon’s case enhanced the public standing of journalists, will the Trump affair indict reporters along with the president in the public’s eye? Woodward’s delay in publishing the recordings has earned him harsh criticism. When these ex-Confederates came to him begging and pleading for pardons, Johnson grew obsessed with the attention and became their best friend, destroying Reconstruction in the process and leading to his impeachment. Johnson, a former slave owner, supposedly hated the Confederacy because he had been a slave owner, and many of the power brokers of the Confederacy had considered him merely a poor farmer. This is actually similar to Andrew Johnson back in 18. But Nixon didn’t always need that instant gratification moment. When the establishment considers them worthy, that’s something that appeals to them. But both Nixon and Trump see/saw themselves as outsiders. For Trump, much of this is somewhat about instant gratification. Either this appeals to him because it means he’s “made it,” or he enjoys the fact that someone like Woodward wants to talk to him. Woodward embodies establishment status that I think appeals to Trump. So someone like Nixon probably has more in common with Trump than it might otherwise seem.įor Trump, this is about power and access. They got power over others with these recordings. While JFK, LBJ, and Nixon all expected the tapes to remain secret, I struggle with the idea that they could have imagined they would be secret forever. LBJ roughly fell into the same category, as, we think, did Nixon. JFK supposedly started them to either have evidence to go after people who crossed him or to write his memoirs. What does that say about their different personalities and approaches to the presidency?ĭavid: The history of presidential recordings is unclear. Q &A With Andrew David BU Today: Nixon recorded himself and expected the tapes to remain secret, while Trump made admissions to a journalist that he knew would be revealed. We posed four questions to David about the Nixon-Trump similarities. Woodward says he needed time to verify whether the often-dishonest Trump possessed sound intel about COVID-19’s lethality. But whereas the Nixon presidency made a knight in shining armor of Woodward, critics now condemn the renowned reporter for not publishing Trump’s comments sooner-he withheld them for his book, out this month-saying Woodward might have saved lives had the public been alerted to the deadliness of the virus earlier. In a bit of déjà vu Yogi Berra would have appreciated, Trump made his admissions to journalist Bob Woodward, known for his groundbreaking investigation of Watergate. Just as Nixon recorded himself admitting complicity in the Watergate cover-up, which led to his resignation, Trump offered recorded admissions, beginning in February, that he deliberately downplayed COVID-19’s severity (to avoid panic, the president said), precipitating an outbreak that has killed almost 191,000 Americans. Damned if the latter hasn’t made a prophet out of David (CAS’05, GRS’18), a former College of Arts & Sciences history lecturer Over the summer term, Andrew David’s American Presidency in the 20th Century class included a section on parallels between Richard Nixon and Donald Trump.
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