Missing Tapes

 Did it finally happen? Did Trump just reach peak Nixon? 

All throughout his presidential campaign and tenure, after all, Trump invited a sense of continuity with the former president. There seemed to be echoes of the Nixon-era "Chennault Affair" in the parallel foreign policy Trump's campaign team ran in the lead-up to the election. Trump himself was personally connected with historical figures from the Red Scare era like Roy Cohn. And the Donald even gathered to his banner some of the same self-described dirty tricksters, viz. Roger Stone, who made their bones doing electoral skulduggery for the Nixon campaign (and who, in Stone's case, bears a tattoo of the former president in case anyone forgot the connection). 

But there were always a few reasons why the comparison between the two men didn't quite fit—at least not perfectly. Nixon, for all his faults, was ultimately a more competent executive and a more complex human being than Trump ever was, for one thing. In the twentieth century president's descent into vindictiveness and criminality, thus, there was a tragic arc of Shakespearian proportions—a one-time liberal Republican and friend to civil rights turned raving paranoiac. By contrast, there was never anything interesting about Trump; only spectacle. 

And on the other side of the ledger, there was for a long time in Trump's case no perfect analogue to Watergate. Trump proved much slipperier in his legal entanglements than Nixon did, at least while he still remained president. Even though he was impeached twice, and the Mueller report managed to unearth significant evidence of various kinds of misconduct and obstruction, there was no single incident as clear-cut as Nixon ordering a break-in that ordinary citizens could recognize as an alleged criminal act. Until this summer, that is. 

Jack Smith's prosecution started to change that narrative. And now, with the revised indictment out yesterday alleging that Trump ordered the destruction of incriminating security camera footage at Mar-a-Lago, the Donald may finally have met and surpassed Tricky Dick. We now have our Watergate analogue. And we even have our parallel to the notorious "missing tapes" in the Nixon investigation. 

Of course, there will be some people who continue to believe the prosecution is all orchestrated and politically-motivated, and who will persist in denying the evidence of their senses, no matter how many smoking guns the Smith investigation lays before the public. People did the same with Nixon—there were always some die-hards who could not be convinced that Nixon had actually engaged in his alleged misdeeds, despite how patent the evidence became. 

In one of his parodies in the 1974 collection of short pieces, Guilty Pleasures, Donald Barthelme impersonates the voice of one of these ultra-convinced Nixon supporters—a fictional member of the "Silent Majority" who no doubt had her real-life analogues at the time. This character intones (the whole piece is written in an Ogden Nash style, in which metrically-uneven lines terminate in long-withheld rhymes): "And I don't really believe in my heart of hearts that the President would go so far as to bug his brother,/And the two missing tapes aren't important because since they didn't exist in the first place how could they contain any terrible news that somebody might want to suppress, sequester, stifle, or smother?" 

And so it is with Trump's security camera. Some of his supporters will simply be content to engage in doublethink. Security camera footage? What security camera footage? Classified documents? Which ones? And since the documents didn't exist anyway, and were never in Trump's hand, how could the security footage show anything that might seem incriminating, or that anyone might want to eliminate from the record? So why would it matter if anyone tried to erase them?

But, as with Nixon, the majority of people cannot sustain that level of cognitive dissonance and denial of reality for long. Eventually, the force of fact and evidence overwhelms them. And those who cannot bring themselves to actually admit the possibility of the president's malfeasance at least go quiet in their denials. The "Silent Majority" becomes no longer a majority (if it ever was one), but really goes silent. 

Such, at least, is my hope. If I'm right that Trump has reached the culmination of his arc toward Nixon-ness, and completed the comparison that always seemed to invite us, without quite bringing itself to fruition, then may the two stories end in the same way as well—with the disgraced former president going off into private life and leaving the rest of us alone at last.