“He did many good things while he was president,” Mondale conceded. “He was very impressive in international affairs—he helped overcome the gap between the United States and China. In civil rights fights that we were involved in, in many of them he was on our side. And many of the judges he appointed to the bench were, you’d say, moderates—sensible people trying to make things work.”
But Nixon had a fatal flaw. “I believe he was paranoid,” Mondale said. “I believe he had a deep, dark side to him that often overwhelmed him. When someone would do something or say something he didn’t like, he wasn’t able, as you should be if you’re going to be in politics, to handle it and move on—to make your arguments, to be heard, to have a campaign, and so on—a civil way of resolving or accepting it. Deep down he had within him some sort of force that required him to dwell on it, to plan on some way of removing this source of criticism.”
If that sounds familiar, it should. Donald Trump, who fashioned so much of his political worldview from Nixon’s time, shares Nixon’s temperament. He is incredibly press-conscious and thin-skinned, and he has said that in his second term he may retaliate against members of the media, politicians, and those who prosecuted (he says persecuted) him. The question is: How serious will these efforts be?
Unlike Nixon, Trump has declared his intentions in public, so no one can say they have been misled. In Nixon’s second term, the opposition party held both houses of Congress; Trump does not face that hurdle. And the current political climate, different from the one during Nixon’s era, seems to bolster Trump. He already commands a compliant arm of the media (from cable news channels to X to like-minded social media influencers and podcasters) and even has his own online platform, Truth Social. In this perilous, corrosive environment, the American public—or at least large numbers of it–may very well abide political prosecutions against Trump’s purported “enemies.”
As I have recently written in Vanity Fair, much will depend on those who occupy top posts at the Justice Department and key legal slots in the administration. Trump’s initial selections seem to signal that he values loyalty over the rule of law. Then there is the conservative-dominated Supreme Court, which, in holding that a president is “entitled to absolute immunity from criminal prosecution” for his official acts, has indicated that it takes a breathless view of executive power; far be it for them to step in to rein in Trump prosecutions.
It is, in a word, a dangerous time.
Fifty years ago, Nixon’s enemies list sparked little fear of actual revenge. Even Mondale found humor in it when he spoke in 2012—a time when Trump was nowhere on the political radar. Mondale recalled how he and fellow Minnesota senator Hubert Humphrey (who had been Lyndon Johnson’s vice president and had run against Nixon in 1968) were in the Senate cloakroom during the Watergate hearings as names from Nixon’s enemy lists were being read on TV. “I ended up number three on Nixon’s enemies list,” Mondale recalled, “and Humphrey wasn’t on the list at all. And there was a long, embarrassed moment there, and I said, ‘Hubert, I never trusted you.’”
In 1973, Mondale’s comment was a punch line. Come 2025, it is not at all clear that any of Trump’s perceived enemies will find it a laughing matter.
