The Nixon Comparison

 J.D. Vance made headlines this week by comparing his own administration to Nixon's. In making this historical analogy, the Vice President perhaps "builded better than he knew." 

Let's see, we have an unpopular foreign war that the United States has basically already lost but can't get out of...

We have a corrupt president who has effectively weaponized the Justice Department and turned into a tool to advance his personal vendettas against political foes and the media...

That same president has slowly devolved into a mad paranoiac. Trump's current obsession with chasing phantom "vandals" at his Reflecting Pool is worthy of the Nixon of the midnight ramblings. 

Vance may be onto something here. Late-stage Trump is indeed a great deal like late-stage Nixon.

Even before Vance drew the parallel himself, the comparison was borne in upon me by reading Hunter S. Thompson's dispatches from the Watergate era in The Great Shark Hunt. 

Thompson writes about a thuggish second-term president convinced that his electoral victory gives him carte blanche to settle personal scores—yet can't escape the fact that he is overseeing an unpopular war with a sagging economy and high inflation. 

Nixon's White House memos about "Domestic Subversives" sound a great deal like Trump's NSPM-7 targeting domestic dissidents who hold views Trump dislikes on issues like immigration and gender. 

Nixon's notorious "enemies list" sounds a great deal like Kash Patel's "enemies list." 

And so on. 

Thompson, meanwhile, writes with tongue in cheek of the "Gross sense of injury" he feels at not finding himself "included on the infamous 'Enemies of the White House' list."

Indeed, it would be a high honor to be judged an adversary of such a repellent foe. 

One is reminded of Bertolt Brecht's poem about the Nazi book-burning—in which the famous author discovers that his own works have not been included on the list of proscribed works, and he takes this for an insult. 

"Haven't I always told the truth, and here you are, treating me like a liar? Burn me!"

We say the same today, of Kash Patel's "enemies list," the lists of subversive ideologies to be hunted down in accordance with NSPM-7, etc. 

It would be an insult—carrying a "Gross sense of injury"—not to be included on such a list, and thereby to be implied to be a tepid endorser and accommodationist of this odious regime. 

With Brecht, with Thompson, we say to this administration: Burn me!