Trump, Outdoing Nixon

IVANKA TRUMP, in sworn testimony before Congress, stated that approximately two weeks prior to the election of 2020, with the president's poll numbers sinking and Biden seemingly poised to win the presidency, her father approached her in the White House, and said: "no matter what happens in this election, we'll just say that we won it. Fuck it." And that, dear reader, should have been the end of Trump's reelection bid, and of his presidency. He had been impeached twice during his first term, and for good reason, a world record. Conspiracy to interfere with an elecion. Election tampering. Treasonous conspiracy. Call it what you want, your choice. The crimes were and remain many and varied, and largely unpunished. By any name, it smacks of moral turpitude, moral depravity. One harkens back to the now infamous "Access Hollywood" episode of October 2016, the one in which Trump, who seldom seeks to conceal his bad behavior because he considers it good behavior, clearly, proudly revealed himself to be a sexual predator. At the time this seemed to spell the end of Trump's first presidential campaign, and to spell the end of his nascent political career. Trump never thought he would actually win against Hillary Clinton, who led in the polls the entire cammpaign and indeed received three million more votes than he. He never actually believed he would be elected, and was therfore wholly unprepared for the prodigious task of governing the country. As has been pointed out numerous times, this goes to the very heart of the presumed but questionable honor and integrity of the American people. It would seem, to paraphrase P.T. Barnum's famous remark, that nobody would ever go broke underestimating the moral and and intellectual integrity of the American electorate. Anyone, it now seems, can go broke overestimating it. It has also been pointed out repeatedly that, egregiously criminal as Trump's behavior is and has always been, the behavior of the Americans who elected him is of far greater concern, far more disappointing, for tacitly if not actively accepting it. This brings to mind the behavior of yet another corrupt Republican president, Richard M. Nixon. Although Nixon, like Trump, was a lifelong criminal (he purchased his election as class president in college), his crimes, by today's standards, pale in comparison to those of Donald J. Trump, aka "Don the Con". After all, what's a little petty break in and theft of documents at Democratic National headquarters between friends? And yet, the entire nation, Republicans included, rose up in outraged indignation in the summer of 1973, as the nationally televised "Watergate" hearings on "Tricky Dick's dirty tricks spellbound the nation. I skipped class my senior year in high school, to the detriment ofmy grades and parental approval, to watch on grainy black and white television as witness after witness testified as to Nixon's criminal behavior. A recent cartoon has Nixon seated next to Trump. A smirking Nixon says: "Jesus Christ, Donnie. You make me look like a fucking saint." And indeed he did, and still does. When the entire nation turned against Nixon, G.O.P. and all, and his impeachemnt and likely removal impending, or so he assumed, he saw the handwriting, and gave up the ghost politically. Nixon's crimes were mere child's play by comparison to Trump. In those days presidential intergity was still presumed, even though it shouldn't have been. We the American people seem to have lowered the bar of our moral standars considerably.