John Dean, one of the key figures in Watergate, has had literal nightmares about Trump's presidency. [View all]
“The American presidency has never been at the whims of an authoritarian personality like Donald Trump,” Dean, who is now 78, told me. “He is going to test our democracy as it has never been tested.”
With Trump preparing to take the oath of office this week, some of his more imaginative critics foresee a Nixonian demise on the horizon—the corrupt commander-in-chief felled by his own hubris, forced out of office. But if prophesies of impeachment seem a tad dramatic, Dean’s own forecast for the next four years is arguably much grimmer. He is not only convinced that Trump will be worse than Nixon in virtually every way—he thinks he’ll probably get away with it.
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“I used to have one-on-one conversations with [Nixon] where I’d see him checking his more authoritarian tendencies,” Dean recalled. “He’d say, ‘This is something I can’t say out loud...’ or, ‘That is something the president can’t do.’” To Dean, these moments suggested a functioning sense of shame in Nixon, something he was forced to wrestle with in his quest for power. Trump, by contrast, appears to Dean unmolested by any such struggle.
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......Dean says Trump will almost certainly weather whatever storms he faces during his presidency. “Unless Trump is a such a disaster that the public rises up and changes control of Congress in the mid-term elections, he is very safe.”
Dean is less sure, however, of how the republic will look at the end of a Trump presidency. “By nature, I am an optimist,” he told me. “But Trump as president is going to be about surviving disaster.”
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https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/01/john-dean-interview/513215/
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