I recently noted that the cover of the latest issue of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s quarterly Intelligence Report features a huge picture of Trump’s head in full berserk mode, along with the headline “The Year in Hate and Extremism.” This week I received a “special appeal” from the American Civil Liberties Union asking me to support its “effective leadership role in resisting Donald Trump’s attempts to undermine the Constitution and trample on the rights of vulnerable people.”Prominent institutions opposing President Trump seem to be taking it for granted that, not only is he a menace to democracy, but that he’s already actively attempting to subvert it. Some Trump critics go so far as to say they’ve seen nothing like this administration since Watergate—a historical comparison as sentimental as it is frightening. For that was quite a time, Watergate, when the plotting and subversion extended to the highest levels of government and democracy dangled by a thread.
Then there was the vice president, Spiro Agnew. Nixon gave Agnew a big job, which was to cut the media down to size. Agnew rose so enthusiastically to the challenge that his words still ring today. National media, Agnew sneered, is dominated by a “little group of men” clustered in Washington and New York who “do not represent the views of America.” Agnew immortally dismissed them all as “nattering nabobs of negativism [who] have formed their own 4-H Club—the ‘hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history.’” Agnew left big shoes, which Trump trusts no one to fill but himself.
