Where Nixon showed respect for America’s legal and the constitutional processes, Trump continues to rail against both.
President Richard Nixon waves goodbye from the steps of his helicopter outside the White House after his resignation on Aug. 9, 1974.
But the transition was far more fraught with peril when Joe Biden, another career lawmaker, took his presidential oath in 2021 amid an even greater test of the nation’s constitutional underpinnings and, in language akin to Ford’s, declared, “America has been tested anew and America has risen to the challenge.”
“These are bad people,” the former president said in what was billed as a press conference but turned into a typical Trump rant. Judge Juan Merchan, he said, “looks like an angel, but he’s really a devil.” In recent years, many people have asked me, as a journalist who covered the Senate during the Watergate era, to compare the two presidents whose flouting of the proprietaries and the laws caught up with them, Nixon via the impeachment process and Trump through the criminal process.
In his official farewell speech to the nation, he said he was acting to hasten “the start of that process of healing which is so desperately needed in America,” declaring that “if some of my judgments were wrong, and some were wrong, they were made in what I believed at the time to be the best interest of the Nation.”
That is why the Nixon-Ford transition went so smoothly and the Trump-Biden one didn’t. And it is why the forthcoming election could result in an even greater threat to our democratic processes should Trump again be defeated and, as he has already suggested, again challenge the result.
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