Modern Whig Weekly 8.23.25
Photo credit: "April 30. 1970, Washington, DC, USA - President Richard Nixon during a television address explaining his Cambodia policy." by Tommy Japan 79 is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
“I know you believe you understand what you think I said, but I am not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant.”
― Richard Nixon
Most days, columnists need to work to find something to write about. You scan the news, hoping something pops out at you, or maybe you call a couple people to see if you can find an angle to a big story which no one else has. But no matter what, you usually have to work at it a little bit.
Not so in any Trump Administration. If anything, there's too much to write about, especially now in Season Two of the show, when there's no reason for anyone in the MAGAverse, let alone the president himself, to hold back. It's an exciting time for the news media. Every day starts with a guarantee of some new outrage, some bonkers tweet, some casual offhand remark frightening enough to send the world scrambling. It's great for business.
Up to now, the whirlwind has mostly played out on the air. And that's where the drama was supposed to go. After all, the president is very much a media creature. He was a failure as a businessman — unless you count getting away with repeatedly cheating people a success — but very adept at getting his name in bold print in the tabloids, right from the very beginning. He was a star on Page Six long, long before the Wall Street Journal even knew his name.
He knows how to get attention.
But on Friday morning, the show didn't play out on television or social media or on the pods or TikTok or YouTube or wherever else the president goes in his relentless quest to penetrate our consciousness. It played out at Amb. John Bolton's house and office as they were searched by the FBI. The feds were supposedly on the hunt because the former National Security Advisor was harboring a stash of classified documents without the proper security clearance.
The cold, premeditated murder of irony was lost on absolutely no one with more sense than a toaster, of course. As a civilian, Donald Trump was caught red-handed with dozens of boxes of classified material he was not authorized to possess. He was clearly on the express to Leavenworth before announcing his third run for president (and it's not a stretch to say he ran to stay out of jail). Using the pretext of searching for classified documents to hassle such a prominent critic must have tasted better to him than a Quarter Pounder.
With cheese.
And that is, as they say, the rub. Using the powers of the presidency so blatantly to silence critics and settle personal scores isn't unheard of, of course. But the last guy to do it with such enthusiasm was forced to resign in disgrace. There isn't much chance of that happening now — the president, unlike Richard Nixon when he held the office, has nothing to fear from the Republicans in Congress — yet the line being crossed is no less clear. Even Nixon himself, in the end, respected it.
But would he today?
The Ghost of Tricky Dick
Richard Milhous Nixon has enjoyed a kind of renaissance this century, an historical rehabilitation of sorts. Once widely vilified, and rightfully so, for his extensive corruption and his many abuses of power, he's now become (and I hate to say this) almost … hip.
Ask any male graduate of a rightward-leaning college or university who went to school during the Obama Administration, and they are as likely as not to proudly pronounce themselves a "Nixon Man." They might even have the t-shirt. Women from the same schools are maybe less strident about it, but no less sincere in their admiration of the man.
To those of us who are old enough to have lived through the Nixon years, and are not hard right-wingers, it all seems quite bizarre. But it's real. It's also not an accident.
One of the ways to raise someone like Nixon from the reputational dead is to focus on their accomplishments and dismiss their transgressions under the ruse, "He was a great but deeply flawed man." In this narrative line, Nixon deserves credit for domestic reforms like the creation of the EPA, economic reforms like taking us off the gold standard for good, for diplomatic successes (along with Henry Kissinger) like "opening" China and ending the Vietnam War, etc. He was a "brilliant statesman and leader."
Meanwhile, the slush funds, the shakedowns, the illegal campaign spying and other dirty tricks, the corruption of the national security establishment, all of it was normal power politics. In the telling of this tale, Nixon was simply unlucky because he got caught doing what everyone else was doing too. And just like that, like magic, he's the victim.
Or worse — a martyr.
All of which set the stage for the rise of Donald Trump, of course. The president's first political mentor was Roy Cohn, who was very much a central figure in the same Red-hunting (or, more accurately, red-baiting) wing of the Republican Party as Richard Nixon in the late 1940s and early 1950s, despite Cohn's membership in the Democratic Party. Later, it was Roger Stone, who had dropped out of George Washington University to run dirty tricks for the Nixon campaign in 1972, who became Trump's political brain.
But the influence of these men would have meant little had the seeds they were casting not fallen on fertile ground. And that's important to consider. Donald Trump didn't become president by offering the best policy solutions or running the greatest campaigns or even by being the greatest con man in history (which he well may be). None of it would have mattered in another time, as his other attempts, or at least hints, at running for president prove. None of it went anywhere — until it did.
What he needed was a culture which not only didn't believe in anything, but didn't believe in believing in anything. What he needed was an Age of Nihilism, where dirty tricks were no longer so much dirty as the mark of having game. What he needed was an IGM (I Got Mine) world, where anything goes as long as you win. What he needed was a society where only the outcomes matter and you do what you gotta do.
What he needed was a reality TV America, where the put-up job is the point, and everyone is in on it. A decade ago, he found it. One can only imagine what someone much smarter, much more experienced and able — someone, say, like Richard Nixon — would do with it.
No doubt, we're in for a hard time. The whirlwind has left the glowing boxes and made its way to the streets. No one can tell exactly what will come next. But of one thing we can be sure: we're never going to find our way out of this until we start believing in believing again.
Before we get to this week's Odds and Ends, a quick note on how you can support the cause ...
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Odds and Ends
It's not too much to say the Trump Administration is carrying out a purge of our military and national security establishment, mostly on the whims of the president, for whatever happens to annoy him. Exhibit Number Eleventy Billion:
Everything evolves, but does it mean progress? That's a great question:
David Brooks (who more than once has tooted the Whig horn) is always a worthwhile listen:
We've often joked about the president being the id personified. But we may have been closer to the truth than we thought:
‘The Science of Revenge’ by James Kimmel Jr. | Book Review - WSJ
In many ways, we seem a distracted culture blissfully unaware of our peril. Don't be so sure:
Backlist Books on Tyranny See a Trump Bump
And finally, in the "sometimes you just can't win" department:
Watch: Vegan firefighter's first day involves 40,000 pounds of steaks on fire - UPI.com
See you next week.
Kevin J. Rogers is the executive director of the Modern Whig Institute. He can be reached at director@modernwhiginstitute.org
Visit the Institute website at https://www.modernwhiginstitute.org/
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