Not even Nixon would stoop so low

After Donald Trump’s cringe-worthy interaction with school-aged children in the Oval Office on Tuesday to promote his administration’s revival of the Presidential Fitness Test, I got a phone call from an aging former Republican officeholder who said seeing Trump interact with kids was like watching Richard Nixon’s “Checkers Speech.”

He was referring to a televised address that Nixon, then a California senator and Dwight Eisenhower’s running mate, gave in the heat of the 1952 presidential campaign in which he exploited his eldest daughter to rebut serious charges of using a secret campaign fund for personal use. Part of the accusation was aimed at a cocker spaniel the Nixons were given by a supporter that his six-year-old daughter Tricia had named Checkers. The speech was exploitative, but not demeaning, and the public forgave Nixon. 

What Trump did was much worse. As a grandfather and a father, let me say it bluntly: How the president of the United States spoke to children that day was wrong. He didn’t talk about puppies — he discussed mass shootings, people being shot in the head, Iran dropping a nuclear bomb on the U.S. and transgender “mutilation,” as well as his campaign to win a Nobel Peace Prize. Richard Nixon at his full-throated worst — croaking “I’m not a crook!” — cannot compare to what Trump said this week to a group of pre-adolescents. Our children and grandchildren deserve better. The future deserves hope. Our children deserve hope. Trump offers none.

Luckily the children looked bored, and the adults in the room who knew better ducked their heads because you know, the president was speaking — or trying to. Trump’s team should have played “Hail to the Chief” and handed out White House coloring books instead. As tepid a reception as that would have been, at least he would have been seen and not heard. For those of a certain age who find themselves comparing Trump’s second administration to Nixon’s, I will only quote my aging Republican friend who said, “Let’s hope it ends the same way.” 

Hunter S. Thompson said Nixon represented “that dark, venal and incurably violent side of the American character.” Many say worse about Trump, and still there is no congressional push to force him out. Few believe that will happen to Trump. For a long time, it never looked like it would happen to Nixon either. Republicans in the Democratic-controlled Congress gave him great leeway, as did a number of Democrats. Many a sitcom, drama and news program of that era lamented the lack of congressional courage. But one day that changed. Then, the next evening, Arizona GOP Sen. Barry Goldwater, accompanied by the Senate and House minority leaders, informed Nixon that his support in Congress had evaporated; the implication was that Nixon should resign or he would be impeached by the House and convicted in the Senate. 

Trump is no Nixon, and his administration is not as talented as the 37th president’s, which leads many to remain hopeful that, at some point, Congress will wake up, and one day Trump will get the same type of visit Goldwater bestowed on Nixon.

JD Vance is no Gerald Ford, and Marco Rubio is no Henry Kissinger. Pete Hegseth is no Melvin Laird — Nixon’s defense secretary who was so incompetent as to be blamed for losing the Vietnam War. Todd Blanche is no John Mitchell, Nixon’s attorney general who went to prison for obstructing justice; neither was Pam Bondi. Kash Patel is no J. Edgar Hoover – publicly. Hoover was competent and corrupt, famously controlling the FBI with an iron fist. Patel has dozens of his employees undergoing polygraph tests after someone outed him for his drinking habits (and apparently having his own bourbon label). And White House Pep Secretary Karoline Leavitt, who scolds the press every chance she gets, is certainly no silver-tongued Ron Ziegler, the press secretary known as Nixon’s faithful mouthpiece — though Rubio could be. He is already the secretary of state, interim national security adviser and acting administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, as well as the acting archivist of the United States. On the weekends he apparently works as an Uber driver.

While Trump entertained children on Tuesday, Rubio was pressed into service as a temporary press secretary since Leavitt is on maternity leave — one of the benefits many Americans don’t get and can’t afford. (The U.S. is the only high-income, industrialized nation without a national paid maternity leave policy.) It didn’t take long for the secretary of state to declare that the Brady Briefing Room was chaos. Someone responded “Welcome to the White House.” (Whoever did that is my new best friend. If they had done it in a Rodney Dangerfield voice, I’d have bought them dinner.)

“Trump’s people are hopeless,” my long-time Republican source lamented. “They wouldn’t do as good as Nixon’s if Trump resigned.” 

Nixon’s Secretary of State and National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger got book deals, and Rubio is the only one in Trump’s sphere who has a chance of replicating Kissinger’s post-Nixon success. He seems to be the only one who can pass a simple cognitive test — and he can obviously multitask. While Laird is routinely castigated for his “Vietnamization Strategy,” at least he had one. Hegseth’s strategy for the Iran war seems to be misquoting the Bible in press conferences while preaching like a tent-revival pastor on a YouTube channel.

As for Trump, he is a narcissist thriving in the darkness that Thompson attributed to Nixon, and he has exploited that darkness and the “violent side of the American character” to divide the country under the guise of unity and peace. He can’t stop himself from doing that — even in front of children, as millions witnessed. Whether it is the destruction of the Rose Garden, the East Wing or in the war he initiated in Iran, Trump is all about tearing it down. His grasp on reality is gone. 

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So the true measure of whether Donald Trump ends up like Nixon hinges on the possibility of being abandoned by those closest to him who wield power. It has nothing to do with the president’s public policies, which are as solid as flatulence, and about as pleasant. And it won’t be about how he frames a narrative — like telling us that higher prices are the sacrifice we have to make, when he never asked us to make the sacrifice in the first place. He just told us. 

All of this is indicative of a man who set up his voters. If they turn up the heat on the powerful members of their party, Trump might feel it. MAGA voters hold the key. We’re now in a place where we no longer need to argue with MAGA over how bad Trump is; we need to show everyone the personal benefit in abandoning him. And that probably still won’t make a difference until Trump supporters personally get bitten by him. 

That’s why former Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene left him. On Saturday she revealed that Trump appeared to threaten her and her children. “They kept coming on my son, my youngest, my baby boy,” she said. “We’re going to snuff out his life. We’re going to put a bullet in his head.” Greene said she texted the president and other members of the administration about the threats. In response, she claimed Trump told her “that it was my fault and I deserve it. If my son gets killed, I deserve it because I was a traitor to him.”

No one with the power to fell Trump has yet abandoned him. Republicans were squarely with Nixon too at this point in time during the runup to the 1974 midterm elections. Then, at the regular Senate Republican Conference lunch on Aug. 6, 1974, Goldwater fumed, “There are only so many lies you can take, and now there has been one too many. Nixon should get his a*s out of the White House — today!” Three days later, the president resigned and left the White House for exile in California. 

Later that fall, the GOP paid a heavy price as Democrats gained 43 House seats, three Senate seats and four governorships. That’s why Republicans are fighting like caged rats in 2026. They don’t want to see a repeat of what happened to them 52 years ago after a president resigned in disgrace. It’s a race to salvage their power, their pride and prejudice. That alone has, so far, kept Trump from suffering publicly as Nixon did, but it hasn’t stopped his private suffering. He has heard the murmurings from the Republican rank-and-file. Even Scott Jennings, the foul-mouthed Kentuckian with a habit of picking Derby losers and rumored to occasionally sip Tennessee whiskey instead of Kentucky bourbon, has been caught trashing the president — off camera.

After appearing alongside Jennings on CNN NewsNight with Abby Phillip in late March, Miles Taylor, who served as the Homeland Security Department chief of staff during Trump’s first administration, wrote on X, “You know who’s a perfect metaphor for the GOP? Scott Jennings. A pundit who mocks Trump with us during commercial breaks — but fawns over Trump when the camera is rolling. Brave enough to speak out… in the green room.”

That certainly isn’t enough to topple Trump. 

The GOP torpedoed Nixon. They will have to do it to Trump as well. When it is in their best interest to do so, they will. The question is, how much longer will we have to wait? In Nixon’s case, the abandonment was organic. As the pressure on him increased because of his widening Watergate scandal, the more he became political poison.

After 50 years, the GOP has become immune to the usual brand of poison. But the president’s graphic interaction with schoolchildren should move the needle. Don’t forget what happened. At the very least, the president of the United States should instill hope in young children. In the past, presidents of both parties have taken that responsibility seriously. Trump shouldn’t be telling kids about nuclear war, and pleading his case for a Nobel Peace Prize. “I don’t want the government parenting my kid” is one of the central laments of the Republican Party — yet there Trump was doing just that, and teaching divisiveness to boot.

House Speaker Mike Johnson says the GOP is the party of “adults.” If so, then they should step up now and follow Barry Goldwater’s example. Abandoning the president is the only option.