PRESIDENCY-GATE?
SIMON BARBER: Will the Trump-Nixon parallels extend to an early exit?
Fifty years ago this November, Richard Nixon was elected 37th president of a country my father, then Washington bureau chief of the London Daily Telegraph, described in his 1970 book America in Retreat as "divided against itself, full of doubts and fears and looking inwards". "The tide may well be turning away from acceptance of the policy recommendations of an educated elite — and against the elite. The day of the simplistic know-nothing yahoo may be dawning," he wrote. Tides go in and out. The latest would seem to have washed up an orange thing called Donald Trump. My father did not consider Nixon himself to be a know-nothing or a yahoo. What concerned him were the fans of former Alabama governor George Wallace, the bittereinder segregationist who as an independent candidate in 1968 won five states of the old slave-holding confederacy. Nixon was less afraid of his Democratic opponent, Vice-President Hubert Humphrey, than of Wallace siphoning off votes he needed for an electoral co...
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