Nothing except 90+ felony indictments? This dude was never charged with a crime before and this year he got hit with a ton of bricks. People like you would be watching the Nixon resignation saying “he got away with everything”.
Do you not understand the gravity of these charges? He’s almost guaranteed to be guilty of something, there’s so many options. Once he loses the election he’ll probably plead to whatever just to get house arrest and end the trials.
People like you would be watching the Nixon resignation saying “he got away with everything”.
I mean… yeah? You think his resignation and pardon WASN’T him getting away with everything?
I’m as hopeful as the next guy that the supreme court won’t just rule that nothing bad happened on Jan 6th and that Trump is allowed to be prosecuted, but 3 years on, it seems pretty reasonable to doubt it until it’s done.
I mean… yeah? You think his resignation and pardon WASN’T him getting away with everything?
I was a young person during Watergate and I can tell you personally that 1974 was a very different time. Nixon lost EVERYTHING that mattered to him personally (power, influence) and ended up living the rest of his life as a well-heeled recluse in and near his San Clemente property because no one wanted anything to do with him. He was so hated that later when he tried to get a New York apartment he kept getting turned down by co-op boards.
Even before Watergate, he was known as Tricky Dick, and when he ran for his second term people wore buttons that said “Dick Nixon before Nixon dicks YOU.” He was the pro-war asshole that kept sending good people to die in a war that no one understood, and then sent the National Guard in whenever campuses would erupt in protest (Reagan did this too, as governor of California). So when Watergate came around and it turned out Nixon had done all this other shit too, even his own party turned on him. Post resignation and pardon, he tried multiple times to return to public life, and they all fizzled out before they even started. He even fucked up his own Frost interview a few years later, basically admitting to crime on national tv.
It took about a year after he resigned for the war in Vietnam to officially end, and even when it was over no one wanted to see Nixon or hear his name. Everyone knew it had gone on as long as it had because of him, long before we all found out he and his boy Kissinger had sabotaged the peace talks. His name was shit.
Ford only pardoned him to protect the office of president itself, the Republican Party, and to ensure that the next ten years wouldn’t be wasted on courtroom theater. Nixon was no Donald Trump, with inexplicable charisma; he was just hated. And that never really changed. When he died in 1994 it was a great deal of nothing, the exact opposite of when Rosalynn Carter passed recently, or when Reagan or Bush Sr died. Even Barbara Bush’s funeral got more airplay. But when Nixon died, it was all two-sentence acknowledgments on tv, like “Richard Nixon, whose presidential career was cut short by the Watergate scandal and his subsequent resignation, has died. He was X years old,” or whatever. That was it. He did not even have a state funeral.
The only difference for Nixon between San Clemente and a jail, IMO, was the size of the cell.
So yeah, you can act like he lost nothing because he was not criminally prosecuted, but he lost everything that mattered to HIM, and he was by no means an ex-president like Clinton or Obama. He was just out there somewhere playing golf and being the butt of SNL jokes until he died. I think people would have voted for Charlie Manson over Nixon for president again. Given the war and the oil embargo and everything else that was going on at the time, I’ve always thought Ford was right to pardon him. Also, Ford gained nothing by the pardon; he served out the remainder of Nixon’s term and then Carter won, so that was that.
Trump is a different animal. At least in the end Nixon stayed out of the spotlight. Trump will either be grabbing the spotlight in any way he can, or be pushing daisies, just because that’s who he is.
It was insane how far he fell. Watergate proved all his opponents right. And yes, his party turned on him. Half of Republican voters still liked him after his resignation but he literally couldn’t get another job anywhere.
I recommend going to the Nixon presidential library. They really try to whitewash the events but it literally stops listing things he did after Watergate. Other presidents didn’t even hang out with him.
Yeah, great catch about 72, thank you Kevon. I just ran out of space and brain cells, lol. Ford should have won easily in '76 in a landslide, but he didn’t win at all. Also, since you’ve been to the Nixon library, you know how he came out of poverty and put himself through law school, which was a huge thing to accomplish. He lost that law license too, after Watergate.
But what I was really hoping to convey, and did not, was that the days of 15-minute fame and 5-minute shame had not yet arrived. Just being outed as gay, for example, didn’t just kill your career, it got you glared at and mothers pulling their children away from you in the street (this happened to the original Ronald McDonald, IIRC) for years after the fact, and this kind of thing was life-destroying. Imagine if you fucked up something so badly and so publicly that anytime you left your house you were glared at, spat at, had people shout at you – and this went on for years. Because Nixon was never charged or sentenced, because there was no public reckoning, it never really ended for him personally.
At least at Club Fed he’d have been respected, and had a chance at post-prison life. I read Chuck Colson’s book; prison was very difficult for these men who had never known anything but comfort and deference, not a free ride at all, but it was still a FAR cry from gen pop. It might actually have been better for Nixon personally had he gone to prison with Colson and Liddy and the rest, but we’ll never know.
He should have fucking hung, for prolonging the Vietnam war by five years and hundreds of thousands of bodies if for nothing else
I agree, but that wasn’t revealed until 20-some years after he died.
I hated Nixon. HATED. He was a complete and total asshole. He was the guy that made turning 18 a horrible date with destiny if your daddy wasn’t rich or famous (look into W’s Vietnam years, for example, or Trump’s for that matter). Remember that Creedence song Fortunate Son? There was a reason for it.
But I still think his pardon was the right thing to do for the country at the time, not because I give two shits about him rotting in a jail cell but because the entire world needed the US to be focused an something other than a disgraced president.
I’m betting that you’ve never sat in mile-long lines to fill your gas tank, or been of age in a war where your best friends, people you personally knew, maybe even you yourself in time were getting called up by the draft to go off to die for a war you didn’t believe in, that no one understood, where nothing at all was won and no bounty but bodies came home. It was a different time and place, without the influence of foreign paid propaganda to influence domestic opinion: judging it by today’s standards doesn’t get you anywhere but wrong.
Speaking of wrong, I do NOT think any kind of pardon, or special treatment, is appropriate for Trump or his cronies. Nixon tried to influence an election; Trump planned an entire coup. Nixon was happy enough with the blood of Asians and his own draftees; Trump won’t be happy with anything but total dictator for life no matter what it costs the world.
I can’t possibly disagree more. I don’t think you understand how restrictive an actual prison is. The man got to live out his days eating good food, going where he wanted, and doing what he wanted. We should all be so lucky to be able to do that at the cost of merely getting some dirty looks here and there.
Given the war and the oil embargo and everything else that was going on at the time
I don’t see how pardoning Nixon helped solve any of that or how they make the pardon any less of a travesty.
Ford gained nothing by the pardon
You know, other than the part where he only got to be president in the first place by making an agreement with Nixon that if he resigned, he’d get a pardon. He got to bail out his buddy and set an example for the rest of his Republican pals that breaking the law is fine, we’ll cover for you from the very top levels of government! No matter what the general public might have thought of it, the people within the party saw it as a huge service to their political machine.
Nixon got to live out his days comfortable, happy, and carefree. “He did not even have a state funeral.” Give me a break. By this logic, Trump doesn’t really need to be prosecuted! He already lost one election, and if he loses the next, he won’t have what’s REALLY important to him, and isn’t that punishment enough?
Of course not. Heinous crimes were committed against the integrity of our country’s ability to have democratic elections, and actual, real, legal conquences MUST follow, or the next asshole will comfortably push things even harder. It’s thanks in part to Nixon’s pardon that the rest of the republicans today are so happy to join hands around their lies about the election being stolen and the Jan 6 rioters being on a tour. They’d never have gotten here so easily without the precedent they have of covering for each other no matter what, no matter how serious, and no matter how high the office.
I can’t possibly disagree more. I don’t think you understand how restrictive an actual prison is.
None of the Nixon co-conspirators went to actual prison; they went to Club Fed.
If you want to know exactly how it was, no need to guess. Chuck Colson wrote a book about his experiences there.
You know, other than the part where he only got to be president in the first place by making an agreement with Nixon that if he resigned, he’d get a pardon.
He was already VP, and you have no idea what you’re talking about. Literally. You have zero idea of how widely these people were hated. Ford was an incumbent Republican and should have won re-election by a landslide. Instead, he did not win at all. And he had no choice but to run because without him the Republicans had no viable candidate at all.
When Nixon resigned, there were no charges against him, only against his co-conspirators, and there was zero guarantee that there ever would be. Nixon literally had NOTHING to give Ford except the promise to get out of town and at least not destroy what was left of the office and his party.
You should at least read more about what actually happened from people who were there. This conjecture about a pardon deal – that you can’t even back up with so much as a guess at a REAL quid pro quo and from which Ford got nothing but the retirement he was looking for anyway – was the product of later conspiracies, not current events in 1974.
And you have no idea how Ford even came to be VP, do you, or how that plays into this at all? Nope. Not a clue.
I don’t see how pardoning Nixon helped solve any of that or how they make the pardon any less of a travesty.
I know. You’re far too busy judging the 1970s by 21st century ideals.
Heinous crimes were committed against the integrity of our country’s ability to have democratic elections, and actual, real, legal conquences MUST follow, or the next asshole will comfortably push things even harder.
On this we completely agree. There is NO comparison between Nixon and Trump, and I made that clear. It’s a shame you had to ignore that and create a strawman to slay to get to this sentence, because I’d have agreed with you anyway.
And just so we’re clear: the most the Republican senators of August, 1974 ever did was withdraw their support for Nixon’s presidency in the face of an impeachment. Nixon resigned. There is NO guarantee whatsoever that any of them would have followed up with anything more, and to pretend so is just one more demonstration of you ignorance of history.
And Nixon getting away with everything, is also why we are where we are now too.
If the judges don’t fuck up the timeline and he loses, we’re probably ok for 4 more years (maybe longer if the trials scare off future fascist wannabes), but we need better voting rights, Supreme Court oversight and smarter voters before we can relax and not worry as much.
Nixon’s pardon was bullshit, but being forced to resign the presidency is not nothing either in the sense that he certainly did face real consequences. I’m with you that he should have faced greater consequences, but it’s simply not the case that he got away with it either. Getting away with everything would mean that he got to finish his term and retire as a respected former president. He didn’t.
No he didn’t. Getting away with everything would have meant finishing his second term and retiring as a respected former president. That didn’t happen. You can’t say that he didn’t face consequences.
Our laws for the highest offices are strongly worded recommendations, not absolutes. They’re going after trump’s businesses (which he’s lost) and him raping people (which he also lost). It doesn’t help that the r’s are backing him as much as they can.
You’re assuming both that he doesn’t win, and given the stakes involved, we can assume unheard of levels of cheating, corruption, and voting fraud, and you’re assuming that scotus doesn’t drag this out beyond the election.
If he wins and he hasn’t been found guilty at that point, then every investigation will be killed on day 1
Nothing will come of it.
Saved you another click
Nothing except 90+ felony indictments? This dude was never charged with a crime before and this year he got hit with a ton of bricks. People like you would be watching the Nixon resignation saying “he got away with everything”.
Do you not understand the gravity of these charges? He’s almost guaranteed to be guilty of something, there’s so many options. Once he loses the election he’ll probably plead to whatever just to get house arrest and end the trials.
I mean… yeah? You think his resignation and pardon WASN’T him getting away with everything?
I’m as hopeful as the next guy that the supreme court won’t just rule that nothing bad happened on Jan 6th and that Trump is allowed to be prosecuted, but 3 years on, it seems pretty reasonable to doubt it until it’s done.
I was a young person during Watergate and I can tell you personally that 1974 was a very different time. Nixon lost EVERYTHING that mattered to him personally (power, influence) and ended up living the rest of his life as a well-heeled recluse in and near his San Clemente property because no one wanted anything to do with him. He was so hated that later when he tried to get a New York apartment he kept getting turned down by co-op boards.
Even before Watergate, he was known as Tricky Dick, and when he ran for his second term people wore buttons that said “Dick Nixon before Nixon dicks YOU.” He was the pro-war asshole that kept sending good people to die in a war that no one understood, and then sent the National Guard in whenever campuses would erupt in protest (Reagan did this too, as governor of California). So when Watergate came around and it turned out Nixon had done all this other shit too, even his own party turned on him. Post resignation and pardon, he tried multiple times to return to public life, and they all fizzled out before they even started. He even fucked up his own Frost interview a few years later, basically admitting to crime on national tv.
It took about a year after he resigned for the war in Vietnam to officially end, and even when it was over no one wanted to see Nixon or hear his name. Everyone knew it had gone on as long as it had because of him, long before we all found out he and his boy Kissinger had sabotaged the peace talks. His name was shit.
Ford only pardoned him to protect the office of president itself, the Republican Party, and to ensure that the next ten years wouldn’t be wasted on courtroom theater. Nixon was no Donald Trump, with inexplicable charisma; he was just hated. And that never really changed. When he died in 1994 it was a great deal of nothing, the exact opposite of when Rosalynn Carter passed recently, or when Reagan or Bush Sr died. Even Barbara Bush’s funeral got more airplay. But when Nixon died, it was all two-sentence acknowledgments on tv, like “Richard Nixon, whose presidential career was cut short by the Watergate scandal and his subsequent resignation, has died. He was X years old,” or whatever. That was it. He did not even have a state funeral.
The only difference for Nixon between San Clemente and a jail, IMO, was the size of the cell.
So yeah, you can act like he lost nothing because he was not criminally prosecuted, but he lost everything that mattered to HIM, and he was by no means an ex-president like Clinton or Obama. He was just out there somewhere playing golf and being the butt of SNL jokes until he died. I think people would have voted for Charlie Manson over Nixon for president again. Given the war and the oil embargo and everything else that was going on at the time, I’ve always thought Ford was right to pardon him. Also, Ford gained nothing by the pardon; he served out the remainder of Nixon’s term and then Carter won, so that was that.
Trump is a different animal. At least in the end Nixon stayed out of the spotlight. Trump will either be grabbing the spotlight in any way he can, or be pushing daisies, just because that’s who he is.
Another thing you haven’t mentioned is that Nixon had destroyed McGovern in the 72 election. He won every state but MA!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1972_United_States_presidential_election
It was insane how far he fell. Watergate proved all his opponents right. And yes, his party turned on him. Half of Republican voters still liked him after his resignation but he literally couldn’t get another job anywhere.
I recommend going to the Nixon presidential library. They really try to whitewash the events but it literally stops listing things he did after Watergate. Other presidents didn’t even hang out with him.
Yeah, great catch about 72, thank you Kevon. I just ran out of space and brain cells, lol. Ford should have won easily in '76 in a landslide, but he didn’t win at all. Also, since you’ve been to the Nixon library, you know how he came out of poverty and put himself through law school, which was a huge thing to accomplish. He lost that law license too, after Watergate.
But what I was really hoping to convey, and did not, was that the days of 15-minute fame and 5-minute shame had not yet arrived. Just being outed as gay, for example, didn’t just kill your career, it got you glared at and mothers pulling their children away from you in the street (this happened to the original Ronald McDonald, IIRC) for years after the fact, and this kind of thing was life-destroying. Imagine if you fucked up something so badly and so publicly that anytime you left your house you were glared at, spat at, had people shout at you – and this went on for years. Because Nixon was never charged or sentenced, because there was no public reckoning, it never really ended for him personally.
At least at Club Fed he’d have been respected, and had a chance at post-prison life. I read Chuck Colson’s book; prison was very difficult for these men who had never known anything but comfort and deference, not a free ride at all, but it was still a FAR cry from gen pop. It might actually have been better for Nixon personally had he gone to prison with Colson and Liddy and the rest, but we’ll never know.
Oh, boo hoo, he didn’t have any friends and had to be well fed and lonesome in a mansion
He should have fucking hung, for prolonging the Vietnam war by five years and hundreds of thousands of bodies if for nothing else
Lol. Hanging people is for us regular folks, not people responsible for the death and suffering of millions.
I agree, but that wasn’t revealed until 20-some years after he died.
I hated Nixon. HATED. He was a complete and total asshole. He was the guy that made turning 18 a horrible date with destiny if your daddy wasn’t rich or famous (look into W’s Vietnam years, for example, or Trump’s for that matter). Remember that Creedence song Fortunate Son? There was a reason for it.
But I still think his pardon was the right thing to do for the country at the time, not because I give two shits about him rotting in a jail cell but because the entire world needed the US to be focused an something other than a disgraced president.
I’m betting that you’ve never sat in mile-long lines to fill your gas tank, or been of age in a war where your best friends, people you personally knew, maybe even you yourself in time were getting called up by the draft to go off to die for a war you didn’t believe in, that no one understood, where nothing at all was won and no bounty but bodies came home. It was a different time and place, without the influence of foreign paid propaganda to influence domestic opinion: judging it by today’s standards doesn’t get you anywhere but wrong.
Speaking of wrong, I do NOT think any kind of pardon, or special treatment, is appropriate for Trump or his cronies. Nixon tried to influence an election; Trump planned an entire coup. Nixon was happy enough with the blood of Asians and his own draftees; Trump won’t be happy with anything but total dictator for life no matter what it costs the world.
I can’t possibly disagree more. I don’t think you understand how restrictive an actual prison is. The man got to live out his days eating good food, going where he wanted, and doing what he wanted. We should all be so lucky to be able to do that at the cost of merely getting some dirty looks here and there.
I don’t see how pardoning Nixon helped solve any of that or how they make the pardon any less of a travesty.
You know, other than the part where he only got to be president in the first place by making an agreement with Nixon that if he resigned, he’d get a pardon. He got to bail out his buddy and set an example for the rest of his Republican pals that breaking the law is fine, we’ll cover for you from the very top levels of government! No matter what the general public might have thought of it, the people within the party saw it as a huge service to their political machine.
Nixon got to live out his days comfortable, happy, and carefree. “He did not even have a state funeral.” Give me a break. By this logic, Trump doesn’t really need to be prosecuted! He already lost one election, and if he loses the next, he won’t have what’s REALLY important to him, and isn’t that punishment enough?
Of course not. Heinous crimes were committed against the integrity of our country’s ability to have democratic elections, and actual, real, legal conquences MUST follow, or the next asshole will comfortably push things even harder. It’s thanks in part to Nixon’s pardon that the rest of the republicans today are so happy to join hands around their lies about the election being stolen and the Jan 6 rioters being on a tour. They’d never have gotten here so easily without the precedent they have of covering for each other no matter what, no matter how serious, and no matter how high the office.
None of the Nixon co-conspirators went to actual prison; they went to Club Fed.
If you want to know exactly how it was, no need to guess. Chuck Colson wrote a book about his experiences there.
He was already VP, and you have no idea what you’re talking about. Literally. You have zero idea of how widely these people were hated. Ford was an incumbent Republican and should have won re-election by a landslide. Instead, he did not win at all. And he had no choice but to run because without him the Republicans had no viable candidate at all.
When Nixon resigned, there were no charges against him, only against his co-conspirators, and there was zero guarantee that there ever would be. Nixon literally had NOTHING to give Ford except the promise to get out of town and at least not destroy what was left of the office and his party.
You should at least read more about what actually happened from people who were there. This conjecture about a pardon deal – that you can’t even back up with so much as a guess at a REAL quid pro quo and from which Ford got nothing but the retirement he was looking for anyway – was the product of later conspiracies, not current events in 1974.
And you have no idea how Ford even came to be VP, do you, or how that plays into this at all? Nope. Not a clue.
I know. You’re far too busy judging the 1970s by 21st century ideals.
On this we completely agree. There is NO comparison between Nixon and Trump, and I made that clear. It’s a shame you had to ignore that and create a strawman to slay to get to this sentence, because I’d have agreed with you anyway.
And just so we’re clear: the most the Republican senators of August, 1974 ever did was withdraw their support for Nixon’s presidency in the face of an impeachment. Nixon resigned. There is NO guarantee whatsoever that any of them would have followed up with anything more, and to pretend so is just one more demonstration of you ignorance of history.
And Nixon getting away with everything, is also why we are where we are now too.
If the judges don’t fuck up the timeline and he loses, we’re probably ok for 4 more years (maybe longer if the trials scare off future fascist wannabes), but we need better voting rights, Supreme Court oversight and smarter voters before we can relax and not worry as much.
Nixon’s pardon was bullshit, but being forced to resign the presidency is not nothing either in the sense that he certainly did face real consequences. I’m with you that he should have faced greater consequences, but it’s simply not the case that he got away with it either. Getting away with everything would mean that he got to finish his term and retire as a respected former president. He didn’t.
Lol Nixon did get away with everything though? And the precedent is what has allowed Trump to trample on our laws.
No he didn’t. Getting away with everything would have meant finishing his second term and retiring as a respected former president. That didn’t happen. You can’t say that he didn’t face consequences.
“Consequences”
Our laws for the highest offices are strongly worded recommendations, not absolutes. They’re going after trump’s businesses (which he’s lost) and him raping people (which he also lost). It doesn’t help that the r’s are backing him as much as they can.
His followers don’t care. The people that would vote for him don’t care
And your point is? That doesn’t change the fact that there will still be consequences.
Only if he doesn’t win
You’re assuming both that he doesn’t win, and given the stakes involved, we can assume unheard of levels of cheating, corruption, and voting fraud, and you’re assuming that scotus doesn’t drag this out beyond the election.
If he wins and he hasn’t been found guilty at that point, then every investigation will be killed on day 1