Dick and Donald

It’s  not a perfect comparison, but when I see Donald Trump galumphing across  my TV screen these days, I find myself remembering Dick Nixon.

Ah , poor Dick Nixon. The faithful Deputy President of President Eisenhower, the man who in turned down a scholarship to Harvard because it would have involved too much travel expenses for his parents, the man who was beaten to the Presidency by John F Kennedy and who told reporters “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore!”, only to come roaring back in 1968 and become President. He ended the Vietnam War,  he opened up relations with communist China, and he gave his backing to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

Doesn’t sound much like Trump?  Hang on a sec.  Tricky Dick was caught up in a web of his own making – wire-taps, break-ins, cover-ups, declarations like “I am not a crook!”  and finally, faced with certain impeachment, he slunk out of his office as President.

Unlike Nixon, Trump makes no attempt to cover up for his lies. Unlike Nixon,Trump gets his kicks in first, as tomorrow’s tsunami of tariffs will show. And unlike Nixon, of whom someone once said “Just think what that man could have achieved if he had been loved!”, Trump has chalked up one four-year term  plus a few months of his second term, and I’ll bet you’ll struggle to think of anyone during that time actually loving – maybe even liking – the orange orang-outang.  His followers see him as a sort of political Messiah, someone who’ll lead them to the glory days, but that doesn’t mean they love him. Donald’s is a face that only a mother could love, and to the best of my knowledge his mother can’t be quizzed on the matter as she has passed on to a better world. A world without her reckless, insightless, achievementless son.