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Shades of Nixon: why Trump must tread carefully in the swamp

Niall Ferguson says Trump has one big advantage over Nixon: Republicans have a majority in all seats of government, and that is where the real power lies

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Why you can trust SCMP
US President Donald Trump addresses a joint session of Congress, as Vice-President Mike Pence (left) and House Speaker Paul Ryan listen, in Washington on February 28. Photo: Xinhua
The US president has declared war on the press. He cannot forgive the media for saying the crowd at his inauguration was small. He is even picking fights with a comedy show. His press secretary is a laughing stock. Worse, the president is trying to pick and choose between news outlets, excluding some from briefings. And he is trying to deflect criticism by accusing his predecessor of having tapped his telephone.
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These are among the many, many things journalists like to say are “unprecedented” about the administration of President Donald Trump. Yet all the things I have just written could equally well have been written about Richard Nixon’s administration.

In 1969, The Washington Post reported that Nixon’s inaugural crowd was “far smaller and at times less enthusiastic than the 1.2m” that had turned out for Lyndon Johnson in 1965. Nixon scrawled in the margins of his news report the next day: “The press is the enemy.” Sound familiar?
So closely is Trump following the Nixon script that, for the first time, I begin to fear for his future

Early in his first 100 days, Nixon also picked a fight with a show that made fun of him, the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. And his press secretary, Ron Ziegler, was despised by Washington journalists.

After his first news conference, Nixon sent a memo demanding, “on an urgent basis”, a list of those in the White House press corps who were against him. In future, he said, he would call only on his friends and not those “who are definitely out to get us”. It was his fury over leaks to the press that led to the wiretapping of National Security Council staff, just as Lyndon Johnson had once bugged him.

Trump escalates war with mainstream US media as he rails against fake news, bars select outlets

For Smothers Brothers read Saturday Night Live; for Ron Ziegler read Sean Spicer. So closely is Trump following the Nixon script that, for the first time, I begin to fear for his future.

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