General Discussion

Last edited Fri Jul 24, 2020, 11:08 AM - Edit history (1)

And 18 months later was down to about 25% approval rating and forced to resign-- and the crimes were much less, in retrospect, than Trump's (however, Nixon's war was much more horrendous). The disapproval for him in the left was very much amplified by the anti-war attitudes. As with LBJ (a Democrat who was probably even more loathed on the left-- this wasn't "partisan" ), the war created the base of opposition to him.

I think with Nixon, it wasn't that the group of people who hated him grew, but the people who liked him in 1972 grew to dislike him-- not to hate him (my mother-in-law even now will say moderately good things about him) but to actually disapprove of him as a "crook".
Those of us who despised him weren't surprised, but we weren't anywhere near a majority.
With Trump, all along, a majority thought he was terrible-- obviously, 3 million more.

Thing is, Nixon for all his many faults and crookednesses had a real idea of what could be good for the country (also did bad, of course). He went to China-- so amazing then that someone made an opera about it!-- and started the EPA. He tried to install wage/price controls to stop rampant inflation. While I seldom agreed with him, I think he had a few areas where he wanted to help the country. He did care.

Trump doesn't care at all about the country. Not one jot. (Or about his family either-- it's like inhuman, well, not even "inhuman," as probably even goldfish care about their families.) So he's worse in an order of magnitude, and I think the monumental and unshifting majority that has been against him since day one is evidence of this. We know he's WRONG and we knew it all along. That's already a majority.

What Trump has that Nixon didn't is a hard cadre of lunatic cult followers who will never leave him. I don't know how many that is-- 35%? 30%? Nixon never had those worshippers, so once the "establishment" quit him, the bottom dropped out quickly. He didn't have a lot of "to the death" loyalists.

I was remembering both Bushes had terrible approval ratings-- below 30% -- near the end of their terms. Trump's base is higher than that, which is truly scary.