“He did a lot of good things while he was president,” Mondale admitted. “He was very impressive in international affairs – he helped bridge the gap between the United States and China. In the civil rights struggles 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 might say, moderates — sensible people trying to work things out.”
But Nixon made a fatal mistake. “I believe he was paranoid,” Mondale said. “I believe he has a deep dark side that often overwhelms him. When someone does something or says something he doesn’t like, he can’t, as you would have done if you were in politics, deal with it and move on—to make your argument , to be heard, organize a campaign, etc.—a civil way to deal with it or accept it. In his heart, he had some power that forced him to focus on it, to plan some way to eliminate this source of criticism.”
If that sounds familiar, it should. Donald Trump, who shaped much of his political worldview from the Nixon era, shares Nixon’s temperament. He is extremely press savvy and slim, and he has said that in his second term he may take revenge on members of the media, politicians, and those who prosecuted (he said he persecuted) him. The question is: How serious will these efforts be?
Unlike Nixon, Trump declared his intentions publicly so no one could say they were deceived. During Nixon’s second term, the opposition party held both houses of Congress; Trump doesn’t face that obstacle. And the current political climate, unlike the Nixon era, appears to favor Trump. He commanded a compliant media team (from cable news channels to X to like-minded social media influencers and podcasts) and even had a foundation own online platform, Truth Social. In this dangerous, corrosive environment, the American public — or at least a large swath of the public — may very well be subject to political prosecutions against Trump’s purported “enemies.”
As I have was written recently IN vanity fair, Much will depend on those who hold top positions at the Justice Department and key legal positions in the administration. Trump’s early choices seemed to signal that he valued loyalty over the rule of law. Then the conservative-dominated Supreme Court, holding that a president “has absolute immunity from criminal prosecution” for his official acts, pointed out that the Court This has a breathless view of executive power; they are far from being able to intervene to restrain Trump prosecutions.
In short, these are dangerous times.
Fifty years ago, Nixon’s enemies list raised little fear of real revenge. Even Mondale found humor in speaking in 2012 — a time when Trump wasn’t on the political radar. Mondale recalls how he and Minnesota senator Hubert Humphrey (who was Lyndon Johnson’s vice president and ran against Nixon in 1968) were in the Senate locker room during the Watergate hearings when the names from Nixon’s enemies list were read on TV. “I was third on Nixon’s enemies list,” Mondale recalled, “and Humphrey wasn’t on the list at all. And there was a lingering moment of shame where I said, ‘Hubert, I never trusted you.’”
In 1973, Mondale’s comments were a highlight. By 2025, it’s unclear whether any of Trump’s supposed enemies will find it funny.
