erik lundegaard

 RSS
ARCHIVES
LINKS

Friday December 07, 2018

Nixon '46 —> Trump '16

“Richard] Nixon adopted, in his first campaign, his signature tactic: making false claims and then taking umbrage when his opponent impugned his integrity. Voorhis was blindsided. ‘Every time that I would say that something wasn’t true,' he recalled, ‘the response was always ”Voorhis is using unfair tactics by accusing Dick Nixon of lying.“’ But Nixon, the lunch-bucket candidate, also exploited voters' unease with a distant government run by Ivy League–educated bureaucrats; he found it took only the merest of gestures to convince voters that there was something un-American about people like Voorhis, people like them. His campaign motto: ‘Richard Nixon is one of us.’”

— Jill Lepore, “These Truths: A History of the United States.” Of course, Nixon's signature tactic didn't go away with Nixon; it grew. It's basically the modern GOP platform. It's the one thing they believe in.

1946 is also the year Trump was born. 

Posted at 02:29 PM on Friday December 07, 2018 in category Books