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(CNN)As Donald Trump tries to shift the presidential campaign narrative away from accusations of sexual assault and his boasts about groping women, he’s reviving themes, and a style, America has not heard so clearly since the Nixon years. Indeed, with a candidate tutored by one of Nixon’s dirty tricksters facing an opponent who worked for the Congressional committee that investigated Watergate, we may be witnessing the last skirmish in the only political war that ever brought down an American president.
Trump’s current emphasis, offered at recent rallies, has been on what he terms the corruption of the “establishment” that supposedly controls America in collaboration with “media corporations” who recognize in him an “existential threat.” Leaving out only the Illuminati, his argument is a fever dream of conspiracy theories that evokes Nixon at his paranoid worst.
During the current presidential race, Trump has borrowed one of Nixon’s catch phrases, calling his supporters the “silent majority.” Like Nixon, who said he had a secret plan to end the Vietnam war, Trump says he has a secret plan to defeat ISIS.
His main campaign theme of “Make America Great Again” evokes nostalgia for the 1950s, when the United States dominated world affairs and heterosexual white males enjoyed unchallenged primacy. In Trump’s view, as in Nixon’s, rivals are enemies who lurk everywhere and form wicked conspiracies.
In a recent campaign speech, Trump gathered all of his enemies together and described them as participants in a vast conspiracy intended not only to defeat him, but to destroy the country. Clinton resides at the heart of the conspiracy because, he said, she “meets in secret with international banks to plot the destruction of US sovereignty in order to enrich these global financial powers, her special interest friends, and her donors.”
Historically, the term “international banks” has been modified with the word “Jewish” by those who seek to exploit anti-Semitism for political purposes. Today, just as overt racism is socially unacceptable, anti-Semitic views about international finance are beyond the pale. But there’s no mistaking the dog whistle signal Trump offered as he spoke of a “small handful of global special interests rigging the system.”
At the Florida rally where Trump made these accusations, he was interrupted several times by cries of “Lock her up! Lock her up!” The chant echoed Trump’s promise that, if elected, he will seek his opponent’s prosecution and imprisonment. Trump’s threat, which defies our democratic traditions, went beyond anything Nixon ever said, even though he did seek to use the government to punish his enemies. Trump, who seems willing to take Nixonism to its logical end, might consider how it worked out for the man who created the art form.
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