It’s Donald Trump’s convention, but the inspiration? Nixon

By Michael Barbaro and Alexander Burns, New York Times News Service

Monday, July 18, 2016 | 9:09 p.m.

Let Trump be Trump, his aides have always insisted. And let his convention serve as an unapologetic tribute to his singular, erratic, untamed persona.

“I want,” the candidate has often said, “to be myself.”

But on the opening night of the Republican National Convention here Monday, Donald Trump was conspicuously trying to conjure somebody else: Richard M. Nixon.

In an evening of hard-edged speeches evoking the tone and themes of Nixon’s successful 1968 campaign, Trump’s allies and aides proudly portrayed him as the heir to the disgraced former president’s law-and-order message, his mastery of political self-reinvention and his rebukes of overreaching liberal government.

It was a remarkable embrace — open and unhesitating — of Nixon’s polarizing campaign tactics, and of his overt appeals to Americans frightened by a chaotic stew of war, mass protests and racial unrest.

And it demonstrated that Trump sees the path to victory this fall as the exploitation of the country’s anxieties about race, its fears of terrorism and its mood of disaffection, especially among white, working-class Americans.

In a startling disclosure on the first day of the convention, Trump’s campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, declared that the candidate was using, as the template for his own prime-time speech accepting the Republican nomination, Nixon’s convention address 48 years ago in Miami Beach. “If you go back and read,” Manafort said at a Bloomberg News breakfast, “that speech is pretty much on line with a lot of the issues that are going on today.”

Trump himself, in an interview, drew explicit comparisons between his candidacy and Nixon’s, and between the current political climate and that of the United States in 1968.

“I think what Nixon understood is that when the world is falling apart, people want a strong leader whose highest priority is protecting America first,” Trump said recently. “The ‘60s were bad, really bad. And it’s really bad now. Americans feel like it’s chaos again.”

The inaugural night of the convention deliberately evoked social cataclysm and physical danger.

“The vast majority of Americans today do not feel safe," Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, told the audience. “They fear for their children. They fear for themselves.” And Rep. Michael McCaul of Texas, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, called on Americans to “take back our country and make America safe again.”

In emulating Nixon, Trump has chosen an unusual and tarnished figure as a source of inspiration.

Nixon sought the presidency under starkly different circumstances, as a conventional politician in a country that was nearly 90 percent white. It will be difficult for Trump to re-create the Nixon candidacy as a political insurgent in a year when 30 percent of voters are likely to be racial minorities.

And by clinging to a dark chapter in Republican history, Trump has pained the party’s leaders.

House Speaker Paul D. Ryan on Monday sternly advised Trump to avoid the politics of race and identity. “The fear I have is the right is now starting to practice it,” Ryan said. “We have to get rid of that. That is going to divide this country.”

Yet for advisers to Trump, who is seen by most voters as a divisive and untrustworthy figure, the Nixon campaign seems to offer the most plausible political blueprint.

Viewed for much of the 1960s as a devious and even nasty politician, Nixon reintroduced himself to the country during the 1968 campaign as earnest and sympathetic, and offered himself as a bulwark against forces tearing at the seams of society.

Manafort said in an interview that the Nixon campaign showed it was possible to “get people to see you in a different light” as a “strong leader but also a human one.”

Comparisons between the toxic political brew of 1968 — racial discord, rising crime, street demonstrations, white anxiety — and the strains in United States society today are frequently exaggerated and oversimplified. The backdrop of Nixon’s election was a nation absorbing the seismic upheavals of the Vietnam War, the Voting Rights Act, the assassinations of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy and widespread rioting in America’s cities. “We see Americans hating each other, fighting each other, killing each other at home,” Nixon said in his acceptance speech.

Today, the collision of a campaign and social turmoil appears, for now, nowhere near as combustible. But the Trump campaign has worked to seize on the parallels that do exist: the killings of police officers in Texas and Louisiana; growing street demonstrations by supporters of Black Lives Matter; and scenes of mass bloodshed overseas.

In Trump’s telling, American neighborhoods are besieged by crime, with entire cities rocked by rampant disorder. Branding himself as “the law-and-order candidate,” Trump in recent weeks has exhorted voters to stand with the police, much as Nixon encouraged “the non-shouters, the non-demonstrators” to stand with him.

What started, a year ago, as an occasional borrowing of Nixonian phrases — like describing Trump as a “silent majority” — has turned into a brazen homage. “It’s literally plagiarism,” said Kevin Mattson, a professor of history at Ohio University who has written a book about Nixon. “I was taken aback by that.”

Trump has regularly embellished the facts to cast the 2016 campaign in an ominous light, with imagery more suited to the Nixon era than to a modern presidential race. He has described crime as having gone “through the roof,” even though the rate of violent crime has dropped by half since 1990.

Jeff Greenfield, a political columnist who was a campaign aide to Kennedy in 1968, called it “ludicrous” to liken the current political atmosphere to that election. But Trump, he said, was tapping into a widespread sense of wariness that for many voters has begun to override the more benign realities of 2016.

“The country seems to be in a pretty unhappy mood, so even if law and order may not be the direct answer, there’s a sense of conflation,” Greenfield said. “The loss of jobs, the sense of cultural unease or upheaval, the sense that things are falling apart in some way.”

But Trump is at risk of misreading Nixon, whose calls to crack down in crime were intertwined with themes of national unity and can-do optimism.

Though his convention speech dwelled on gloomy themes, Nixon did something else, too: He spoke poignantly about his dreams as a boy growing up poor in California, and he appealed to highly educated suburban voters who have eyed Trump with deep suspicion.

Edward F. Cox, Nixon’s son-in-law and the chairman of New York’s Republican Party, said the Nixon-Agnew campaign of 1968 had been caricatured as an angry and divisive affair, with the gentler notes of the acceptance speech largely forgotten.

Cox, who attended Nixon’s speech and was in Cleveland this week to support Trump, said criminal justice would be a powerful theme in 2016. But he urged the presumptive Republican nominee to incorporate stronger notes of uplift, too.

“You need to have that optimism in this speech,” Cox said. “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it’s certainly rhyming, and it’s a softer rhyme here.”