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Unfortunately the question in the title about how we survive the end of the Trump presidency isn’t addressed, let alone answered, in the article. Short of going into a medically induced coma with instructions to “wake me when it’s over” I suggest knowing your limits and not wallowing in anxiety producing news. Streaming video works for me. Fortunately I’d never watched the prime time musical soap opera
“Nashville” and this has been a great escape. (124 episodes on Hulu)
Apropos to the 41 days of hell article I found today’s T.R. Reid Washington Post OpEd "If Trump is serious about running again, he should study Nixon" offered a fascinating presidential comparison to Trump.
When Nixon lost to JFK there were real indications of fraud which if investigated could have swung the election to Nixon.
National Republican leaders strongly urged Nixon to fight the results in both states. The vice president recalled later that he was sorely tempted. “There was no question that there was real substance to many of these [fraud] charges,” Nixon wrote in his memoir “Six Crises,” published in 1962. In private Nixon fumed, telling friends at a Christmas party that year “we won, but they stole it from us.”
Yet unlike the current president, in public Nixon quickly accepted the reported result. By noon on the day after the election, both Nixon and President Dwight D. Eisenhower had graciously congratulated Kennedy on his victory. In “Six Crises,” Nixon explained his decision not to fight: “The bitterness that would be engendered by such a maneuver on my part would … have done incalculable and lasting damage throughout the country. … I could think of no worse example for nations abroad … than that of the United States wrangling over the results of our presidential election, and even suggesting that the presidency itself could be stolen by thievery at the ballot box.”
But Nixon also had personal considerations for his decision to man up and concede his loss. If he had waged a legal battle against the reported results, Nixon wrote, “Charges of ‘sore loser’ would follow me through history and remove any possibility of a further political career.”
Who would have thought? Nixon proved to be an actual patriot one time in his life. It is a tragic end that he squandered a place of honor in history for his overtures to China with Vietnam, his Enemies List, and of course with Watergate.
In his final days as his impeachment became certain his mental health deteriorated and he became clinically depressed and was often drunk. Basically this was a grief reaction and nothing a clinician would find to be an extraordinary reaction to the loss he was facing. Nixon had many flaws. He had no ethical compass. He is famous for his Enemies List. He also prolonged the Vietnam War for political gain, so he had blood on his hands, lots of it.
Nixon did not have the excuse of being a psychiatric aberration with rare combination of disorders. His actions were manifestly evil.
Still, a chorus of mental health experts never made the case that he was a malignant narcissist, a bully, a sadist, and sexual predator.
He had feelings, he loved Pat, Tricia, and Julie, and he had a cocker spaniel named Checkers.
There’s no way someone like the notable journalist Tom Wicker could write something like this about Trump:
Richard Nixon was an introvert in the extroverted calling of the politician. And as if that were not problem enough for him, he was an intellectual appealing to a public that puts low value on eggheads. I don't mean an intellectual in the stereotypical sense of a cloistered scholar; I mean that Nixon was a highly intelligent man who relied greatly on his own intelligence and that of others, who had a considerable capacity to read and understand technical papers, who retreated to a room alone and wrote in longhand on a yellow legal pad the gist of his major speeches, who impressed associates with his ability to evaluate disinterestedly the pros and cons of a problem, who in the opinion of Arthur Burns, whom he appointed to head the Federal Reserve, could have "held down a chair in political science or law in any of our major universities." Reference.
Nixon didn’t try to destroy our democracy when he lost to JFK. Unlike Trump’s attempt to throw out an election, Watergate was, if not the most, one of the most egregious affronts to democracy in American history. Unlike Trump, though, he did not try to burn The U.S. Constitution to embers on his way out once it was inevitable he’d be impeached.