Talking About U.S. Politics: Why was Nixon impeachable but somehow Trump isn't?

Why was Nixon impeachable but somehow Trump isn't?

The times, they have a-changed since the 1970s.

There are various reasons as to why Richard M. Nixon was easier to consider impeachable in the 1970s and Donald J. Trump seems to be “untouchable.”

The biggest factor is, of course, the differences in the political environment in which both Administrations existed. Nixon was elected in 1968 and took the Presidential oath of office on January 20, 1969, and was re-elected in November of 1972 and managed to stay in office until he resigned on August 9, 1974. Trump was elected in November 2016 in a vastly different electoral and cultural environment.

Nixon’s Presidency took place at a time when the Internet was not quite a thing; a proto-Internet existed in 1969, but it was essentially limited to the federal government and academia. The Vietnam War and its divisiveness were sowing the seeds of social discord that made Trumpism possible. The war - which America was losing and many of the “best and brightest” government officials who planned and ran it were aware that it was a lost cause - cast a great pall over everything else, even dimming the successes of the Apollo Program. Cable TV existed, but only as a means of transmission and there were no competitors to the Big Three over-the-air networks (ABC, CBS, and NBC). The press was still widely respected; no one back then, with the exception of extremists on both sides of the political spectrum, spoke derisively of the “mainstream media.”

Both of the major parties were still in the hands of politicians who put country before their own partisan organizations first, but they were evolving. The Democratic Party, which had long been divided into two geographically-based wings (the deeply conservative Southern-and-rural folk, versus the liberals from the Northeast, the West Coast, and the big cities), was moving to the center-left and championing causes it had long resisted, particularly civil rights for blacks and equality for women. It also became disenchanted with some of the policies that Cold War Democrats such as Harry S. Truman, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon B. Johnson had embraced. such as treating every single Third World crisis as a reason for U.S.-Soviet tensions, and the seemingly endless war in Southeast Asia.

For its part, the Republicans - delighted to see the Democrats in such dire straits - were happily absorbing an intake of disenchanted Southerners who were leaving the party that had dominated the former Confederacy since the end of Reconstruction and joined, paradoxically, the Party of Lincoln. In one of the strangest twists in American political history, the party that started out as a progressive anti-abolitionist group had, by 1912, become the Party of Big Business. After World War I, the GOP tended to be isolationist, penurious to the point of irresponsibility when it came to defense spending, and as far as foreign relations were concerned, it was more interested in Asia and the Pacific than it was in European affairs. This held true even after World War II, so much so that GOP obsessions over “who lost China” after 1949 influenced Democratic Presidents’ foreign policies between 1949 and 1953, then again (after President Eisenhower’s two terms in office) between 1961 and 1969.

Nixon, who had been Eisenhower’s Vice President from ’53 to ‘61, won the 1968 election not just because he was running at a time when the public was tired of a war that had started during two Democratic Presidents’ watches; he won because his predecessor in the White House refused to publicize the fact that the Nixon Campaign, aided and abetted by powerful Republican donors like Anna Chennault, had colluded with South Vietnam’s government to sabotage the ongoing peace negotiations with North Vietnam in order to hurt Vice President Hubert Humphrey’s chances of winning the Presidential election in November.

The story is far too complex to relate in this answer, but the bottom line was this: the FBI and CIA were aware of the deal between South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu and Nixon’s representatives. CIA recordings - which LBJ was made aware of - revealed that Thieu agreed to pull out of the Paris peace talks, a move that would prolong the Vietnam War, shortly before the election. Democratic voters and independent voters, who were mostly sick of the war, would either stay home or vote for Nixon to keep LBJ’s stand-in, Humphrey, out of the White House.

Nixon Prolonged Vietnam War for Political Gain—And Johnson Knew About It, Newly Unclassified Tapes Suggest

Nixon’s Presidental campaign needed the war to continue, since Nixon was running on a platform that opposed the war. The BBC:

Nixon feared a breakthrough at the Paris Peace talks designed to find a negotiated settlement to the Vietnam war, and he knew this would derail his campaign.

… In late October 1968 there were major concessions from Hanoi which promised to allow meaningful talks to get underway in Paris – concessions that would justify Johnson calling for a complete bombing halt of North Vietnam. This was exactly what Nixon feared.

President Johnson had at the time a habit of recording all of his phone conversations, and newly released tapes from 1968 detailed that the FBI had “bugged” the telephones of the South Vietnamese ambassador and of Anna Chennault, one of Nixon’s aides. Based on the tapes, says Taylor for the BBC, we learn that in the time leading up to the Paris Peace talks, “Chennault was despatched to the South Vietnamese embassy with a clear message: the South Vietnamese government should withdraw from the talks, refuse to deal with Johnson, and if Nixon was elected, they would get a much better deal.” The Atlantic Wire:

In the recently released tapes, we can hear Johnson being told about Nixon’s interference by Defence Secretary Clark Clifford. The FBI had bugged the South Vietnamese ambassadors phone. They had Chennault lobbying the ambassador on tape. Johnson was justifiably furious — he ordered Nixon’s campaign be placed under FBI surveillance. Johnson passed along a note to Nixon that he knew about the move. Nixon played like he had no idea why the South backed out, and offered to travel to Saigon to get them back to the negotiating table.

Though the basic story of Nixon’s involvement in stalling the Vietnam peace talks has been around before, the new tapes, says the Atlantic Wire, describe how President Johnson knew all about the on-goings but chose not to bring them to the public’s attention: he thought that his intended successor, Hubert Humphrey, was going to beat Nixon in the upcoming election anyway. And, by revealing that he knew about Nixon’s dealings, he’d also have to admit to having spied on the South Vietnamese ambassador.

I’m devoting this much time to this particular issue because it was the initial snowflake that led to the avalanche known as Watergate. In essence, everything shady that Nixon’s White House did before and during the Watergate break-in and the coverup, including the break-in into Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office and Nixon’s behavior regarding the release of the Pentagon Papers in 1971, stems from the Thieu collusion deal.

Why?

Simple. Nixon knew that if there was evidence that he had participated with wealthy China Lobby Republican donors in a conspiracy to prolong an unpopular war to win the Presidential election of 1968, he would be impeached. He had some serious skeletons in his closet, and he had to make sure, by any means necessary, to prevent any leaks about them.

But going back to the topic as to why Nixon was impeachable and Trump apparently is “untouchable”….

I think, in part, the case against Nixon was more “provable” than the current Trump-Russia connection because of the “secret tapes” of Nixon and his aides in the White House. Nixon was, tragically, a better-prepared and more effective President than the current one, but he was way too confident that his dirty deeds would not be discovered. He also believed - wrongly - that as President of the United States he was in some ways “above the law.”

Also, although Nixon, like Trump, had a loyal base of supporters in Congress and in the public. most of them turned their backs on him once the famous “smoking gun” tape was released and Congress voted to impeach the President.

The 2016 issue with Trump’s campaign and Russia is different for several reasons. There are quite a few, and because they are pretty time consuming, I’ll just outline them with bullet points:

• The Republican Party’s rightward slide that began in 1980 has made the GOP leadership in Congress veer into hyperpartisanship: Party Over Country is the new mantra
• Trump was careful to do everything through his campaign and limited his contacts with Russia before and during the election
• The media environment has changed radically since 1968
• The creation of Fox News Channel in 1996 and the dominance of conservative talk radio since the late 1980s has helped the extreme right indoctrinate its followers
• Right-wing propaganda, whether helped by Russia or not, has hammered home to conservatives the message that liberals are evil, anti-American scumbags who want to destroy the nation and turn it into a larger version of Cuba or Venezuela
• Conversely, the right-wing ideology has also railed against the evils of a liberally-controlled mainstream media
• Since it was media coverage of the Watergate Scandal of the 1970s that helped remove Nixon from office, the GOP has also taken up as its mantra “If it’s reported by CNN, ABC, CBS, or NBC, it’s FAKE NEWS.”

The Mueller Report is available online (as PDF files) for free or in affordable book editions at any bookstore or via online emporiums such as Amazon. Yes, there are quite a few redactions (to protect ongoing cases and investigations), but it has damning evidence that, if the media and political environments were not as toxic as they are now, would make Donald J. Trump impeachable.

But unfortunately, this is 2019, not 1974.