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Watching the press briefing Trump gave... something in me finally broke.
I don't think it matters what you call Trumpism. I think that we've spent all of this time propping up a broken system with a broken man. I recoiled from the accelerationists who said they were using Trump to break the system because that just seems so destructive and vile, no better than the people who break Starbucks windows.
I thought: maybe he's a good man. Maybe we should give him a chance. And the Democrats are so vile in their baseless slander.
But the Dermocrats didn't make him give that speech on January 6th.
Hillary Clinton should have been jailed and she should still be in jail. There is nothing to be gained however from holding on to a tool that has run out of use.
I mean is there anyone out there who didn't understand why Democrats were in shrill hysterics about fascism? The man like to scare them, and I don't know if I believe that he had so much fun terrorizing the libs (it's so easy and someone has to do it) that he fell into it, or if... well, I just can't go down that road yet.
This criminal wasn't worth all of this divisiveness in our politics. Maybe the divisiveness was already there.
I regret my support for former president Trump and I want him to withdraw from public life. Nixon had the decency to step down when his time was up.
which explains a lot of why the next 50 years were such a disaster for anyone with even remotely similar politics
Nixon is the perfect example of what not to do. Cooperate-bot is a losing strategy. How many times and for how long will you lose before you figure this out?
Nixon didn't resign out of decency. His advisors had told him that the Senate would vote to convict, and he didn't have the kind of grassroots Republican support that Trump did that would allow him to seek revenge on the Republican senators that voted against him - the hard-core Republican primary voters already preferred Reagan to Nixon by this point.
Nixon didn't fight back because of decency and he rolled over instead of fighting back against a coup against his administration, too. He did it because fighting back would have entailed him revealing how corrupt, coopted and sick the US government was at that point. And the US was made strictly worse because of it.
Zero "hard-core Republican primary voters" supported Reagan over Nixon in 1974. But Nixon certainly set the standard for the GOP turning vast electoral victories into finding ways to lose.
What would "fighting back" involve? Are you suggesting that you know something Nixon's advisors didn't, and that he had a way of avoiding Senate conviction? Or are you suggesting that he stage a coup to remain in office despite the Senate voting to remove him? (SecDef Schlesinger and NSA Kissinger had already taken steps to prevent orders to stage a Latin America style coup reaching the military)
We now know that Woodward and Bernstein were stenographers and that Mark Felt (aka "Deep Throat") was a swamp insider trying to remove Nixon for swampy reasons. But that doesn't matter as a matter of law or politics - in 1974 the Republican caucus in the Senate wasn't prepared to support a President who swore like a sailor while plotting the cover up of an outrageous piece of ratfucking in an election he would have won anyway. If you are caught red-handed committing a crime, attacking the motives of the prosecutor is not convincing to anyone who wasn't supporting you anyway.
Nixon did find a way of turning a vast electoral victory into a way to lose - but that was staging the Watergate burglary in the first place. That is what I don't understand - why did he do it? With McGovern as the Democratic candidate, the 1972 election was basically in the bag without the information he was hoping to get from the bug tape. The trifecta of committing a serious crime, getting caught, and having powerful enemies is not usually recoverable, and I don't see how it would have been for Nixon.
Burning all the intel agencies (Watergate was an op by one against him) to the ground.
Because everyone did it all the time. He was the first one who the FBI decided it was worth launching an operation to take out for what was, bog standard politics.
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