Is Trump Repeating Nixon? John Dean on Whistleblowing & US Politics

In this episode of SOS America, host Charles Feldman sits down with John Dean, the former White House Counsel to Richard Nixon who became the key whistleblower during the Watergate scandal.
Dean reflects on his role in exposing one of the biggest political scandals in American history and discusses whether the actions of Donald Trump echo the events that led to Nixon’s resignation.
Topics discussed include:
• The striking comparisons between Trump-era politics and the Watergate years
• How John Dean blew the whistle on Watergate inside the Nixon White House
• What lessons America should learn from the scandal
• The state of US democracy and the importance of accountability
• The upcoming US midterm elections and what they could mean for the future
Dean also shares insights from his career in Washington, the pressure of testifying against a sitting president, and why the Watergate scandal still matters today.
If you're interested in US politics, presidential history, or the inside story behind Watergate, this is a must-listen conversation.

#Watergate #JohnDean #DonaldTrump #RichardNixon #USPolitics #SOSAmerica  #PoliticalPodcast

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Do you think that Donald Trump would think that that Nixon was kind of a wimp for resigning, that he should have just hung in there.

SPEAKER_01 0:08

Albut said that he liked Nixon. It's remarkable how blatant the uh the cover-up is. Uh they don't know shame. They are shameless. Uh you can't embarrass Donald Trump. You can't embarrass any of them. Trump has said uh publicly that he doesn't understand why Nixon resigned. They will be in things like the Tea Party uh that raise hell and don't follow norms and attack a uh a black man who becomes president uh in the most vicious of ways. I called it long before it became so prevalent as it is today. You mean these are these are descriptions of the people who are running the country today?

SPEAKER_00 1:06

Welcome to another edition of SOS America. I'm Charles Feldman. Thank you very much for continuing to uh watch or listen to this podcast. We've been doing it now for several months. And as those of you who have been watching know, but I guess for those of you who haven't been watching and maybe are finding us for the first time, the purpose of this particular podcast and why it's called SOS America, is to try to explain to people in this country, but also people who are living outside of the United States what exactly is going on here. Because uh we are clearly, when I say we, the country, is clearly at some sort of an inflection point. Uh what that point is, uh I think we're kind of slowly unraveling that as we go from episode to episode. I can't guarantee that we will come up with any definitive answer or conclusion, but we're going to try our best to do as much as we can to get as close as we can to answering that fundamental question. That having been said, uh there are many people that we have talked to and will talk to who can talk about historical things, can talk about uh the history of the United States, the history of the presidency, that sort of thing. There are very few people who are actually part of American history, very few, really. My guest today is one such person. John Dean is very much a part of American history. Uh he was the White House counsel for Richard Nixon, when Nixon, of course, was president of the United States. You may recognize if you're either old enough or uh have actually looked through some history books, uh, or maybe people don't do books anymore, so I don't know, history tweets. Uh you will know that John Dean uh was, of course, associated with the whole Watergate uh incident in American history. Um in the past few years, he has done um, I think, very admirable service as a political analyst for many different uh news organizations. He's written a number of books and will uh too many for me to remember, so I'm gonna let John uh say what they are as we go on in this conversation. So I I really welcome uh to this particular podcast, John Dean. John, thank you for being with us.

SPEAKER_01 3:44

My pleasure, Charles. It's uh it's nice to see you when I broadcast with you. Uh it's normally over the telephone for decades, it was over the over the telephone to uh a radio audience. So it's nice to visit.

SPEAKER_00 3:59

Yes, thank you. It's right, it's always good to see somebody. Uh so let me uh let me start off by uh and I don't want to dwell too much on on the the uh Nixon years, but I I will only for this particular fast becoming irrelevant. Well, uh and and that's kind of the point I want to see if we can talk about. Uh up until Donald Trump, the the big quote American political scandal was Richard Nixon. I lived through that. You certainly lived through that, you were involved in that.

SPEAKER_01 4:37

I blew the whistle on it.

SPEAKER_00 4:38

I blew the whistle on that. Uh and I remember watching you on television uh in the days when there were only three television networks. Uh much younger edition. Fift 50 years does make its mark. We were both much, we're both much younger than John. But you're looking good. Um but the the where I'm going with this is that that was, you know, when you went through the history books since that time, the 70s, uh that was always kind of the political scandal uh of the 20th century in American politics, was the the Nixon uh White House.

SPEAKER_01 5:18

And they found out that it was the standard below which no president wanted to get uh to be accused of Nixonian behavior. Uh and there were a whole set of norms that were set post-Watergate, and you just didn't violate those until Donald Trump arrived. But that's later in the story.

SPEAKER_00 5:43

Well, but but but that's the the the question I'm going to ask to start off our conversation. Uh so you have Richard Nixon, and as you put it, and I think quite eloquently, uh the the sort of uh the floor below which no one ever in the White House wanted to uh go. And now you have Donald Trump, uh who is in not his first, but his second term in his mind, I guess it's his third, but but his second time in the White House. Uh has that floor now reached the sub-basement?

SPEAKER_01 6:25

Donald Trump is Richard Nixon on steroids and stilts uh as far as behavior. Uh they're very different men. Uh they have some common traits, but they have more uh distinguishing traits. So, and I'm sure we'll get into that as we move along. But is the Watergate standard even relevant today? No. Uh one day of Trump is uh a scandal that ran 900 days for Richard Nixon, although he did get re-elected with an overwhelming mandate because the public really wasn't paying attention. Uh but the the mechanics of scandal are similar sometimes. And uh we don't know how this is all going to play out yet. The biggest difference, Charles, is the Republican Party has gone over the hill to support the lowest of Nixonian behavior, which did not happen uh during Watergate. Uh Nixon, you know, really had to leave office because he could he'd lost his support. Uh the uh Republicans said this is enough. Uh and it was particularly his lying that uh got him in trouble. And uh today to think that a Nixon lie would result in a president resigning uh is just not even conceivable. We have uh we get lies every day now. Uh they're the standard of behavior. You cannot uh you have to double check everything he says uh and then find out um he puts lies on lies. So it's a very different time than it was during Watergate.

SPEAKER_00 8:21

You know, I I uh did not know uh Richard Nixon. I I certainly protested him uh when he was in the White House, uh, but I didn't know him. Uh I I I did know uh President Trump uh years ago anyway. So I have some feel of of what the man is, or maybe was. Uh but I'm wondering it what do you think Richard Nixon, uh, if he were alive today, would think of uh Donald Trump?

SPEAKER_01 8:55

I think he'd be very upset with Donald Trump. Uh Nixon actually was an establishmentarian, he believed in institutions. He had been vice president. Well, first of all, he'd been in the House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate. And, you know, while he was a critic of Congress when he got in the executive branch, he understood how it worked and what its role was. And once he became uh vice president, he actually served for a short while during Eisenhower's presidency as the acting president. So uh he had held all those positions before he was elected to president. And as a two-term president, he didn't finish the second term, but he understood the institution and he admired the institution. And he actually occasionally uh would since he was privately recorded uh or secretly recorded, uh sometimes on those tapes uh he makes statements that are let's protect the presidency, don't do something to weaken the presidency. Uh these are thoughts that Trump has never even conceived, uh, that you would want to protect these institutions. And I, you know, I I think that uh uh the uh the authoritarianism that was always in Nixon uh just got unleashed in a way we could have never anticipated with Trump. Uh as we were discussing before we went on the air just recently, you know, just in the last couple of years, I've done two books on authoritarianism. I did that, did the first one without even mentioning Watergate or the Nixon White House or much to do with that at all. And it was prompted by my the people I work for, um, and as well as my colleagues who I didn't understand. Uh I didn't understand what drove Nixon. I didn't understand what drove people to click their heels, salute, and go do what he said without even raising a question. I was not that type. That's one of the reasons I bec I broke rank with with what was going on. It just got too far out of bounds for for my pleasure. I tried to get the president to protect himself, but uh he he didn't want to hear it. So uh the uh the times have changed and what Trump has done is he's unleashed authoritarianism as being okay. Uh let me uh let me just footnote what I'm saying by saying I I I had my second book, we ran a national poll. Uh I collaborated with the foremost uh authority on authoritarian personalities. I was interested in the personality side of it, not the mechanics of authoritarians, you know, how they how they take over, what they do, what their various moves are. Other people had done that. What had been largely ignored for the general reader was social science that had been going on since the 1940s, where it was asked, can it happen here? And the people who ask it were interested in personalities, would they would they go along uh and follow an authoritarian in the United States? Uh they found largely no uh at that point that uh these people much live mostly lived under rocks and uh it wasn't accepted behavior. So what we found when we did the poll is about 40% of any given population has varying degrees of authoritarianism that will control and direct their life. Um we were stunned about 35 percent. Uh we did this poll just before uh the most recent re-election of Trump, and we found they were uh they were Trumpers. They they were MAGA, they were uh make America Great Through Authoritarianism people. And it's a it was a staggering number. That's a big part of the 77 million who voted for Trump are authoritarian personalities. Um why they're doing it now and didn't do it before is Trump's made it okay to do it. Uh he's given them permission to come out from under the rocks and uh indeed uh be who they want to be. So the United States could be changing if these people uh keep control of the government. The uh the the fact that we've not been here before has largely been that people were uh really they were reluctant to come out and show who they truly were. They were a lot of Nixon's voters, I realize today, after uh two decades of studying this personality, but they were also uh not they they they knew it wasn't accepted behavior, if you will, so they sort of hid their authoritarianism. Today it's out and about and the norm.

SPEAKER_00 14:35

I I want to to uh and we're gonna continue with this particular discussion, but also uh uh I I don't mind selling uh some books, John. So so why don't you tell our viewers and listeners the names of those books?

SPEAKER_01 14:47

Well, the first book I did was called Conservatives Without Conscience. And that was a play on the uh title of the conscious of the conscience of a conservative by Senator Barry Goldwater. Uh it was a book that uh sort of created his rise uh to from a local Arizona uh senator to a national figure. And uh I have known the senator since I was 13 years old. He's passed now. His son and I, uh his son being a congressman from California, uh were roommates in prep school. So and we used to go visit his dad, and his father obviously had a well, I never asked him to help me get a job in Washington ever. Uh in fact, he told me uh he was once I did get hired and was with the uh House Judiciary Committee as one of the counsel, uh, he said, You got to promise me, John, you'll get out in five years. And I said, Why, Sonny? He said, Well, he said, I to see too many bright young guys waste their life here in the government. And you want to do public service, which I hope you will, come back in later, go out and make some money and then come back in. Uh, so that was always my agenda. I just left sooner than I wanted, and not under all the circumstances I would have chosen. But I I uh uh I knew the senator from youth. Uh, he was not the man uh who many perceived as being some sort of wild-eyed radical. That's the way he was portrayed in the 64 election by Lyndon Johnson, uh, that he would be throwing nuclear weapon or bombs in the uh men's room of the Kremlin. But uh rather he was he he was uh a businessman who just thought the government should not be in the business of running businesses, um, which is odd given you know his conservatism is very different than today's conservatism, where we own, you know, Trump wants to run the businesses and the uh the government and all the social programs connected with it. So it's uh and it's probably out of ignorance that Trump uh takes these positions. Anyway, uh the first book was called Conservatives Without Conscience, because um he had the senator had retired, and his son Barry Jr., uh and I, who talked very frequently, had said, Listen, dad is bored. Why don't you do a book with him? I at that point had I'd ghosted a couple of books for members while I was working up on Capitol Hill. And he he said, Why don't you know, why don't you do something with dad? And because it would keep him going and get him, give him a purpose and what have you. And the and the senator uh Barry Jr. ran it by his dad and said, That's a great idea. And so we started talking and trying to get a concept, and the reason he wanted to do a book was the religious right was on the rise. And he was having a public dispute with Jerry Falwell, who at that point was the leader of the religious right. Uh, and he uh made a statement that had gotten a lot of attention, uh, where uh he publicly said Jerry Falwell should be kicked in the ass. Well, he didn't really say ass, he said kicked in the nuts, if you will. Uh he was a much more direct and wanted to hurt more. Uh he said, John, I can't envision these preachers getting a hold of the Republican Party and what they can do to it. They they think they're acting on the word of God and they won't compromise. They are dogmatic in their beliefs, and they can they just won't work. Government will fail if they get a hold of the machinery. Kind of an early perception of uh the threat we're now facing. Anyway, he said, I'd like to understand why. So I began digging and digging, and that's when I discovered that social science has been looking at this issue since post-World War II. Uh would this country do uh what happened under a Mussolini and a Hitler? Could that happen here? And so a group of fairly distinguished psychiatrists and psychologists and political scientists uh studied it for a number of years, and then that has been ongoing study. It is a it is a wing of uh largely psychology now, also political science looks at it. Uh historians have looked at it. So I found all this science, and about the time I was digging it out, uh Barry Jr. called and said, Listen, dad hasn't you missed a couple of your calls because he's not he's a little under the weather. Why don't you just pull back on this project a little bit until he's feeling better? Uh we had come up with the title by that time of the fact that uh conservatives had lost their conscience. So that's where the title evolved from uh of conservatives without conscience uh to play on the senator's uh words. Well, to make that that that story short, uh the senator uh never really recovered. And I put the project on the shelf and then about 10 years later uh pulled it back down. Uh when I uh when I turned 65, I decided decided I could afford this become an author because you don't know if a book is gonna sell or not. I've done 14 of them, and who knew every other one would be a a big New York Times uh bestseller success. Uh so it's been fun as well. And I still think I have one or two left in me. Uh at uh I'm 87 and God willing, there's uh I can keep uh keep cranking them.

SPEAKER_00 21:05

Uh I hope so.

SPEAKER_01 21:07

But anyway, that's a long story. On the one book, the second the other book I'll be much briefer on. Yeah. Um the one of the people, one of the academics who was very helpful on conservative without conscience was a man by a Canadian uh professor, but he was actually an American from St. Louis. Uh and he'd gone to Carnegie Mellon and then gotten his PhD and then gone up for a teaching gig in Canada and never left. And done a lot of research on authoritarian personalities. He was the leading social scientist in that area, uh, and creating a criteria for something that is known in social science as right wing authoritarianism. Um and while he did find some left wing authoritarians, uh the overwhelming bulk of them are conservative. Who are authoritarian personalities. And he was very helpful. He realized I was a serious student of this when I, after I had uh refreshed my memory on how statistics work and was digging into lots of social science papers that were really highly technical and what have you, and started this email exchange that uh uh would go on from the mid-70s uh into the 80s, and then before the uh 2020 election, uh we would correspond regularly, and and uh he suggested we do a book together. Uh he was a more academic writer than I had learned how to write for the general audience. So I said, Bob, you're I had pushed him to write a layman's edition of his work, which he did and posted, but I said, we need to reach the my my audience. I have a I had a at the at that point about uh 300,000 readers. I could count on buying my books, and that'll that'll sell a lot of books. Uh publishers like that. So I said, uh let's do a book and and uh in collaboration. And I said, the collaboration is I'll just make sure that it's for the general reader, and you can crank out your your science, and we can get your science out there in front of uh Americans, as well as I knew a uh the head pollster at Monmouth University, which was a very sophisticated poll. They've since uh, with a Trump member joining their board, really pretty much shut down their polling uh because it was not coming out well for Trump. Um but uh Patrick Murray uh is somebody I'd struck up a relationship with, and I said, Patrick, there's really never been a national poll of Bob Aldermeyer's science. And he's done some testing down here, done a lot of Canadian testing, he's done some in foreign countries, but we want to do a poll, and so he made me an offer I thought was fair and to to do it. Uh so we ran a national poll uh with Altemeyer's science is uh underlying the questions, and it was startling how many conservatives, which uh initially I called without conscience, they then they're they're known as right-wing authoritarians or social dominators, with some having both sets of science developed traits. And these are we probably should have used it called them radical conservatives, because that's really what they are. Uh but I uh because Bob has a uh Oldermeier had a large academic audience still, I kept the the social science uh labels on them. Um the book did okay. Uh as I say, I would have gone a little less scholarly, a little more general audience, but uh it's out there with that with this national poll. And I get academics uh who discovered the book uh still are contacting me and saying, my God, you know, uh they're out there. The the interesting thing about authoritarians, Charles, is uh there are several types. The the the most troubling are called social dominators, uh the less troubling are right-wing authoritarians. Everybody has a some degree of authoritarianism in them, but these are people who it drives their personality.

SPEAKER_00 25:51

Uh where does where does where does President Trump, in your view, uh and based on on those studies, where in the second book, uh what we want, because not people, people at that point didn't know what he was.

SPEAKER_01 26:08

So uh the first part of that book really uh portrays who Donald Trump in his personality were. There was enough public material out, and just collecting it and bringing it together, we did a portrait of Trump to show that he's a poster boy for what they call the uh the double high, the person who tests uh both as a right-wing authoritarian and as a social dominator. Or we uh they're really right, as I say, radical Republicans or radical uh conservatives. They they they may or may not subscribe to uh conservative beliefs. What they subscribe to is power. And then you add into Trump the narcissism, and that's what we've got. And it is as troubling as can be. The good news I wanted to tell you though, uh good news. Yes, the good news is they're the minority, these personalities. They are a distinct minority. There are more of us who are not authoritarians or any not not really, barely we show up on the charts. And there, as I say, there are more of us than there are of them. And for all these decades, we have kept them really out of power. Uh, you know, until now? Until now. You know, we've had we've had Louie Long, we've had George Wallace, we've had uh they've come along, you know, uh there have been varying degrees of authoritarian personalities who have stepped up on the national stage and never made it. Charles Lindbergh was a uh, you know, uh his America first uh uh had a big audience, about 40 percent probably, and uh but but could not get over the hurdle of the rest of us. And that's the question. Are the rest of us going to stand up and say, this is enough of Trump? This is enough of authoritarianism, um, or you know, the same is true in Hungary and these other countries that have authoritarian leaders. They have they are a minority who has taken charge. They are the uh they are the corrupt and powerful who uh terrify the normal people and then take control of the government.

SPEAKER_00 28:39

Right. But but and that begs uh uh uh I think maybe a fundamental uh question here then. Uh because it applies not only to the U.S. You mentioned Hungary, uh the the far-right movement, of course, is is is doing fairly well in in uh in France, uh to some degree uh uh I I suppose uh even in the UK compared to a few years ago. So uh I guess the question is what's changed? You had mentioned that up until now, uh that minority has been kept at bay, uh, and the individuals who were looking to be authoritarian type leaders didn't quite get to the pinnacle of power because the check and balance checks and balances were really the majority of the population. So what has changed not only in the U.S., because I think you're absolutely right, it this is not just uh a U.S. uh phenomenon, although Trump of course grabs most of the headlines. This is something that's happening pretty much in around the the globe. Why?

SPEAKER_01 29:53

Academics call it ill liberal ill-liberalism or sliding democracy or democratic order. Uh and we have we have slid uh in uh along with other countries as to their uh their democratic core beliefs. Uh the Brennan Center, who you may be familiar with, being someplace you should do some interviewing, uh they keep track of this, and uh we're just not where we used to be by any stretch of the imagination.

SPEAKER_02 30:31

Why is it happening?

SPEAKER_01 30:33

The explanations are a little different, probably in each country. Uh why has it happened here? Uh it's uh it's because of, you know, I I think there, you know, some specifics and some general things that have happened. I think not teaching civics in high school, which has been true for several decades now, uh, has resulted in virtually no understanding of the mechanics of government and the way they work. Uh we the uh the the graduating uh high school norm is incredibly ignorant about politics and what who can do what, and and uh that the president of the United States is not the mayor. Uh he doesn't fix potholes, although they think he should. You know, it it it's a lack of it's a lack of sophistication, and education is, I think, in the United States one of the primary reasons. Uh as time has passed, they you know, everyone's stunned at the so-called Watergate norms that were developed post-Watergate, uh, that controlled the norms being norms being just agreed-upon practices that were not reduced to laws, uh, which I argued back some years ago, they should be laws, and then they're clear uh that you're violating the law rather than just violating a norm, which is feels a little softer and what have you. But um the uh we gradually uh there's been less public outcry about the violation of the norms. They they uh they grew old, people forgot them, uh the standards started changing. So it's been an evolution. And as I say, the Trump was a trigger to uh legitimatize uh uh a lot of this behavior. He was a he was a public figure uh as a result of the apprentice. I I didn't know that I never met the man, but I sure as hell knew he was. Uh when I first when he first came down the escalator uh to run for president, I had to do a lot of reading. And what what is absolutely weird is I told my wife Maureen, I said, Mo, I said, if this man is ever elected to the presidency, what that he seeks, I hope somebody will keep count of the gold in Fort Knox. Well, last night she told me somebody in Congress wants them to count the gold in Fort Knox to see if it's all there. Because it be I he was pretty apparent uh very early if you took a hard look at him.

SPEAKER_00 33:37

But but but but that but this is why I find this whole thing so so puzzling. Uh okay. I I I I could understand, even if I don't necessarily agree, with those who are the you know, the MAGA folks, those who voted for for him and would perhaps vote for him again, because he seems to think he can do this again. Um I I I I get that they think that he sort of hears them, he hears their problems, they think he could fix, as I think you put it before, they think that he can fix the potholes in whatever community they they live in, even though of course that is not what a uh a president does. I I get all of that, but the uh uh the uh apparent uh corruption, uh the transparency actually, of how Mr. Trump and his family have accumulated, apparently, according to many reports, uh great uh wealth in the years that he has now been back in the White House versus the first term and in the first year of his uh now second term. It is so transparent. I don't understand how those people who think, yeah, this guy he hears us. He, you know, he's our champion. Why would they let him get away with doing the kinds of things as self-enrichment that I'm sure if if it was somebody in their own community, they would be aghast?

SPEAKER_01 35:17

Well, the short answer is they don't care. Uh they don't care. They don't care. Uh he's the leader of, to put it simplistically, and less than fully exposed, he's the leader of the cult. Uh and he can do no wrong in their estimation. They can forgive. Uh what I I did pull out of the book because I I thought this could come up in our conversation, uh, something that took me many, many months to do was to go through social sciences uh portrait of the different players who become uh varying degrees of of uh of leadership and what have you. And the social dominators are the so-called leaders. Let me just read the the the this science says they got to have at least uh three qualities or four qualities. They're typically men, but they have to be dominant, dominating, they have to oppose equality, they have they're desirous of personal power, and they're amoral. Those are the four uh those are the four that science says that that will make somebody, that is the core of being a social dominator. But look at what else they are. They're intimidating and bullying, they're faintly hedonistic, they're vengeful, they're pitiless, they're exploitive, they're manipulative, they're dishonest, they cheat to win, they're highly prejudiced, they're mean-spirited, they're militant, they're nationalistic, they tell others what they want to hear, they take advantage of suckers, they specialize in creating false images of their self to sell themselves. They may or may not be religious, they're usually politically and economically conservative and republican. Now, that was written in 1976. That's a portrait of Donald Trump. Uh the the the right-wing followers, the people who are inclined to go along with a person like that, they're both men and women. They're called the the followers. Uh they're these are people who test, and here are the essential uh the three criteria that science says puts them in this category. They're submissive to authority just by their nature and personality, they're aggressive on behalf of that authority, and they're very conventional. Uh and to the core. They want things the way they think they should be. Uh, but they're also highly religious, religious right. Uh they're highly, excuse me, they're they have moderate to little education. They trust untrustworthy authorities. They're prejudiced, very prejudiced, against homosexuals, women, followers of other religions, but they're also mean-spirited, they're narrow-minded, they're intolerant, they're bullying, they're zealous, they're dogmatic, they're uncritical toward towards their chosen authority. You say, why don't they complain about the corruption? This is okay. Uh they are hypocritical, they're inconsistent and contradictory, uh, they're prone to panic easily, they're highly self-righteous, they're moralistic, they're strict disciplinarians, they're severely punitive. Concentration camps, you know, those are fine with them. Uh they demand loyalty and and they return it. They have little self-awareness, and they're usually Republicans. Uh, but 2006 shows it's uh uh I called it long before it became so prevalent as it is today. You you know, I mean these are these are descriptions of the people who are running the country today.

SPEAKER_00 39:23

So so that raises the question that when the time comes, and it will, despite what what Mr. Trump thinks, uh when he is out of the White House, what happens to those? Uh you know, I I I dare say it's probably not all the 77 million who voted for him uh the last time around, but a sizable percentage of that is my guess, uh, who fit those descriptions that you just read, or the kind of person that would um uh uh be okay with a Donald Trump type character in in power. Where the where do they go?

SPEAKER_01 40:06

They don't go anywhere. What do they they will remain they will remain in the religious right, the Christian nationalism. They will they will be in things like the Tea Party, uh that raise hell and don't follow norms and attack a uh a black man who becomes president uh in the most vicious of ways. They'll be there. The problem is the overwhelming majority of us are not, don't think like they do, and we can take control back of the government. Uh and that's the way it has been traditionally in the United States. Uh so it's up to American voters who, if they don't want an authoritarian country, we won't have an authoritarian country. If they want to sit on their hands or let the other guy take care of it, we will have an authoritarian country because that they've seen now the way these people think and operate. Uh and the question is, do they want it? I have they don't.

SPEAKER_00 41:07

We have midterm elections coming up uh here in November for Congress. Um right now, the Republican Party, of course, the party that Mr. Trump uh I was gonna say the party that that Mr. Trump belongs to, although I I guess you can argue that it's not really the Republican Party anymore, right? It's it's Trump's whatever. Um but but they are in control of both houses of Congress. Do you think that Mr. Trump, combined with his allies in both the House and Senate, will succeed in one way or another derailing the midterm elections so that they do not lose power?

SPEAKER_01 41:49

Well, that's obviously they realize they are losing uh some of their followers. Uh the the the and they're awakening those of us who are not authoritarian personalities. Those people are saying, I don't want to see uh emigrants beaten on the streets, I don't want to see children snatched from their home or used as uh bait to lure people out of their home. Uh something that doesn't trouble the the uh the authoritarian at all. Uh so the question is, uh can he corrupt the election process? It's it's not I don't know the answer definitively. I do know that there are a lot of very intelligent people who uh are dedicated to preserving our democracy are busy at work on this. I'm a part of a couple groups that uh that work on the legal side as well as uh you know, CNN, I I've been with CNN for eight years until recently. And uh, you know, after uh as the evolution of CNN to both sideism has changed, the producer used me much and much less because they knew where I was coming from. Uh it's not that I'm anti-Trump, it's I'm anti-authoritarianism.

SPEAKER_00 43:23

You know, you had mentioned at the very beginning uh uh that if you go back to the Watergate years, you know, you blew the whistle on Richard Nixon. Why isn't there somebody in the White House? Why isn't there a John Dean in the White House now? I know in the first term for Mr. Trump, there were, if not quite John Dean's, uh, people who certainly said to him, No, Mr. President, you cannot do this or you you you can't do that. Um but no one apparently now?

SPEAKER_01 43:51

Well, I don't know. There may be. Uh you know, it's it's still early. It it's the uh it's the first. uh year has just passed of the second term. Um I you know I was uh I was in essence forced to do what I did uh and I knew it would be rough to do it. In fact I lived in the witness protection program for 18 months in and out of it uh because it it is uh physically threatening to do what I did. Um I was I suspected I could cost Nixon his presidency uh but I wanted to end what I was totally unacceptable behavior and I was surprised. I I'm re-looking at Nixon uh because I think Nixon's motives are so much different than than Trump's. I think I don't I never thought Nixon's motives were bad. I think that he somewhere along the line told his mother a good Quaker who we uh loved and and uh uh really wanted to please that he would do everything he could and by joining the government by going in the military as a Quaker uh that he would do everything to to help find peace in the world and that was really his agenda uh he didn't care much about domestic politics and and really let his aides uh handle that much more than foreign affairs where he had a strong hand because he knew the world he knew the world as well as his family he knew leaders uh from his days as vice president and I think that was his driving force and he believed uh that sometimes you had to abuse power uh to to deal with uh the rest of the world who were not the nicest people always and uh so i i think there probably will as a result of trump be a total re-examination of of richard nixon and you know when when you not there's not been much done on his on his motives uh it's primarily been on his abuses but uh when i look when i begin to look at what was driving those abuses uh they're very often connected with national security and uh national security was his forte and he he was trained in the in the world if you will by Dwight Eisenhower when he was became acting president you know he was very close to Eisenhower and stayed in touch with him but as as Eisenhower's uh vice president they became very very close it was sort of a father-son relationship well the the image of Eisenhower is sort of vuncular where he's just this wonderful smile and gentleman but think about it you couldn't have run D-Day where you knew hundreds of thousands of Americans were gonna die if you were some kind of wallflower. Eisenhower was a tough tough cookie uh and I think Nixon thought you had to be a tough tough cookie to get peace in the world. So where does Trump fit in this? He doesn't he doesn't have the intellect he doesn't have the experience and and understanding of institutions he doesn't have the respect for institutions where you can use them effectively whereas Nixon did. So I as I say I think we're we're seeing uh you know very different potential for looking at Richard Nixon. You know I I asked at the beginning of the podcast what do you uh what did you think or what would you think Nixon would think of uh Donald Trump so let me ask it the other way around do you think that Donald Trump would think that that Nixon was kind of a wimp for resigning that he should have just hung in and do it said that all but said that he liked Nixon Nixon and Nixon had they had a friendship the the letters that have exchanged between them are are just very surface um but Nixon liked Nixon liked Trump because he had a he had a football team and Nixon thought he was really uh an expert on calling plays in football games so he would send suggested plays to Trump and uh Trump would pass them on to the coach and so some of Nixon's uh football strategizing uh would uh uh work its way into Trump's uh New Jersey generals as I believe they were called um you know I you know I think that I think that Trump has said uh publicly that he doesn't understand why Nixon resigned and he wouldn't he wouldn't he wouldn't get it um these authoritarian the particularly the the double highs the the the true the the dominators uh they don't know shame they are shameless uh you can't embarrass Donald Trump you can't embarrass any of them because they're just not built that way and I you know the the reasons I focus so much on personality is I think it drives us all and drives politics in general and there's so much science out there on it that it just I I complain to my social scientist friends all the time why don't you start talking about these things and sharing them and writing publicly or going on more television programs. And they just don't want to because it's frightening uh they they know what you know they don't want they're not the type they're not built to go to battle uh is is the pro another problem. Hopeful or not am I hopeful or not? I'm I am I think that the the uh institutions can hold the courts are holding uh even Trump appointed judges are ruling against him there are literally uh I was following two three hundred cases up until a couple weeks ago uh and he's losing in in court uh so that's the first good thing secondly the the American people have finally realized who this guy is and they're taking to the streets in 40 degree weather like you're familiar with uh in Idaho here your visit but anyway they they North Dakota but close enough North Dakota okay it is close enough uh but but I I think the people are they just don't want to tolerate this and they're gonna discover that uh uh it's very hard to be a authoritarian dictator when you have unless you have uh a passive uh audience or a uh the rest of your your group can can is so ruthless that uh they can put those who do speak out out of business. Uh we haven't reached that point yet. Uh nobody's knocked on my door not that they might not uh but you know that that's the risk but it so more and more people are speaking out uh more and more people are protesting so combined with the institutions that are working a big test is is for example the Supreme Court it couldn't be clearer in my mind and everything I studied for all these years that the president doesn't have the power to tax the American people he cannot do tariffs he cannot write taxes this is an exclusive congressional power and it's a very thin margin that uh the speaker is able to hold together the Republican caucus and it broke the other day uh on the Epstein affair I think that that horrific scandal that is being buried could could send uh authoritarianism to to hell and back uh and and it would to take a long time to come back though. I was wondering if it would if we would get through much time before Jeffrey Epstein's name would come up we probably could have made it the distance if you'd have said that but anyway it it he is uh uh you know he that's that it's remarkable how blatant the uh the cover up is uh the Watergate cover up which ran for uh 900 some days was really uh in the dark i mean and people didn't know about it um and uh you know but for Nixon's tapes we never would have known and understood it fully I did a book called The Nixon Defense which took me five years to do because I transcribed all of Nixon's Watergate conversations. I had a team of grad students uh fortunately I had the lead one was a woman getting her PhD in archival science and she'd been a legal secretary and she sort of took charge of the transcription I discovered very early it was easier for me to listen than to sit at the keyboard myself although I did I did ruin ruin my hearing doing the book because I put earphones I did everything I could to to just to listen to some of the conversations are very difficult to hear.

SPEAKER_00 54:07

The conversations recorded in his executive office building office uh the the microphones were always hidden in the desk nobody sat around the desk in the oval in around the Oval Office yes I all my con I have 37 conversations uh uh that uh and I'm glad I I do virtually all my other ones some of them disappeared uh you know you know let me interrupt because because uh it a thought comes to mind you know and that is I've heard people say gee I wonder if uh like Nixon who had those uh secret recordings which really did uh do him in uh if uh Donald Trump does that and my thinking is he doesn't need to make secret recordings he says everything on television he he is by personality and the training of Roy Cohn explains everything he's going to do before he does it not takes we uh we should say for people who who may not know uh Roy Cohn was a famous infamous however you want to look at it uh attorney uh who was for a good portion of time Donald Trump's lawyer this is way before Donald Trump uh uh uh was in politics but uh Roy Cohn was known uh for his ruthlessness I think that's a pretty accurate uh description uh as an attorney uh so sorry to interrupt I just wanted to get also a a a poster boy authoritarian personality uh very much so and uh authoritarians like each other they respect each other uh particularly the the meaner they are the the the more of these traits they have they understand each other and Trump got it you know if you say you're gonna do it you know no one's gonna think you're acting in secret and that's why uh you know uh I'm surprised that they're not handling uh the cover up of of Epstein with a little bit more finesse than they are but uh it's it it is just blatant now what they're doing and uh you know Pam Bondi uh is willing to play the Todd Blanche is willing to play uh because they're gonna they'll lose now they're in big they they're they've bought into it so they they own it.

SPEAKER_01 56:36

What do you think they're covering up though a horrific child sex trafficking activity. Uh it involves people that uh the people that uh are otherwise once considered respectable and people are as you know as their name is even surfacing where there's no indication they did anything wrong just the association with Epstein is resulting in their resignations now they just can't even be he is uh um he is so toxic he is so radioactive that they're uh you know as their names are surfacing and I think the Congress will if not not this Congress the next one will get down into those papers and it's going to be even worse for Trump. This is this is in a sense it's like Watergate and it's difficult to go away it's was ignored for a long time uh during the totality of the Biden administration uh they just uh not for partisan reasons they just had other things they wanted to do rather than pursue uh uh you know what what could have been a uh a whole explanation and um anyway they made lots of mistakes with Trump and how the threat he really was uh and that they could they could have prosecuted him as well and he could be serving time right now for uh espionage act violations as well as uh a lot of fraud cases uh that uh he's he's carrying the the guilt uh charge on 34 is it uh uh uh felonies for uh uh fraud in New York. In New York yeah so um but you know no one no one really has ever believed he would make it and he's got some smart people with him now he he tried he people who realized he just might make it and the Heritage Foundation put together that that 20 Project 2025 which is a horrific conservative uh radical conservative document it they just again very open what they're gonna do they said they were gonna do it in 180 days they're getting close to that now and uh why 180 days well now they have they can maybe mend a few things and get re-elected and maybe not have a total drubbing at the midterms so that's right now.

SPEAKER_00 59:28

John Dean uh I want to thank you for taking the time to be with us on on the podcast. It was a very interesting conversation I enjoyed it I hope you did it as well um and and uh I hope to have you back at another time on the podcast um that does it for this episode of SOS America for those of you who would like to subscribe it is free so we always encourage you to do that uh any comments of course are more than welcome so until the next edition of SOS America I'm Charles Feldman thank you