A famous parable revolves around the troubled relationship between a scorpion and a frog. A scorpion needs to cross a river. Unable to swim, the scorpion asks a frog to carry him on his back. Listening to the request, the frog responds that he is hesitant because he fears that the scorpion will sting and kill him. After the scorpion assures his new friend that he would never do that, the frog agrees. Halfway through the journey, the scorpion stings the frog. Slowly dying, the frog asks, “Why did you do this?” The scorpion responds, “I’m sorry, but it’s in my nature.”
The story is a classic lesson about how dangerous people don’t usually change. Even when promising that they will act differently, the likelihood is that they won’t. It is also a tale about taking warning signs seriously. The frog understood the risks that he faced, yet he chose to ignore them.
A famous parable revolves around the troubled relationship between a scorpion and a frog. A scorpion needs to cross a river. Unable to swim, the scorpion asks a frog to carry him on his back. Listening to the request, the frog responds that he is hesitant because he fears that the scorpion will sting and kill him. After the scorpion assures his new friend that he would never do that, the frog agrees. Halfway through the journey, the scorpion stings the frog. Slowly dying, the frog asks, “Why did you do this?” The scorpion responds, “I’m sorry, but it’s in my nature.”
The story is a classic lesson about how dangerous people don’t usually change. Even when promising that they will act differently, the likelihood is that they won’t. It is also a tale about taking warning signs seriously. The frog understood the risks that he faced, yet he chose to ignore them.
U.S. presidential elections frequently involve warnings signs. Over the course of a campaign, voters learn a great deal about the candidates running and the potential costs of putting someone in office. Sometimes, a majority of voters decide to heed those warnings, yet there are other times in U.S. history when voters end up the frog.
In 2024, there are more warnings signs than usual about one of the major candidates: the Republican nominee, former President Donald Trump. There are big red flags from both his first term in office and his post-presidential years waving over and over about what Trump 2.0 would bring. Another one came on Wednesday, when the Washington, D.C., district judge handling the federal election conspiracy case against Trump unsealed a 165-page document with the fullest picture of what special counsel Jack Smith had found.
To understand how voters have the capacity to cover their ears to avoid hearing alarm bells, look back to 1972, when President Richard Nixon won reelection in a landslide victory against Democratic Sen. George McGovern. Too often, the story of Nixon’s reelection in 1972 and Watergate are treated separately. The thing is, there were, in fact, many people warning of who Nixon was as a politician and what he would likely do when freed from the restraints imposed by having to worry about reelection.
The familiar narrative on the 1972 election is that, riding high on diplomatic breakthroughs with the Soviet Union and China, Nixon defeated McGovern in a stunning victory that rivaled President Franklin Roosevelt’s coalition-building reelection win in 1936. There were many Americans who didn’t like Nixon or his policies, but it wasn’t until investigations in 1973 that his severe abuses of presidential power were revealed. Had the country only known more, so the story goes, the electorate could have averted the disaster they collectively faced on Aug. 9, 1974, when Nixon stepped onto a helicopter, leaving the White House in the middle of his second term.
In fact, numerous representatives and senators had been trying to expose Nixon’s nature even before that election. After Nixon announced on April 30, 1970, that he had secretly deployed troops to Cambodia and conducted a massive bombing campaign, there was a fierce outcry from Democrats about how he had lied and threatened the balance of power to accelerate a disastrous war. Idaho Sen. Frank Church and Kentucky Sen. John Sherman Cooper began drafting a bill to prohibit the president from using congressional funds for operations in Cambodia. Congressional critics railed against Nixon’s turn to impounding funds that they had appropriated and which he failed to veto. Soon after the break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate building in June 1972, Democratic Rep. Wright Patman, a Texas populist, attempted to launch an investigation into the connections he suspected between the burglars and Nixon’s reelection campaign. The effort, covered by the press, was undercut by Nixon and his allies on Capitol Hill.
Journalists and public intellectuals were on Nixon’s case long before most voters cast their ballot. In 1971, the administration’s efforts to prevent the press from publishing the Pentagon Papers, a secret Defense Department study exposing the lies told to justify the war in Vietnam, required the Supreme Court to intervene, culminating in the 6-3 decision in New York Times Company v. United States, which allowed publication. The media praised the decision as a blow to a president who was intent on stifling the press. In March 1972, Life published a story based on a nine-month investigation that accused the Nixon administration of having “seriously tampered with justice” to insulate supporters in San Diego from criminal prosecutions involving illegal campaign contributions. “The administration has in several instances taken steps to neutralize and frustrate its own law enforcement officials,” the magazine noted.
By mid-October 1972, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and Time were publishing stories about an FBI investigation into whether Nixon’s reelection team was involved in sabotage operations, including the break-in at the Watergate building, against the Democratic campaign. On Oct. 16, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein published a blockbuster story about how Nixon’s personal lawyer, Herbert Kalmbach, revealed that he “was one of five persons authorized to approve payments from the Nixon campaign’s secret intelligence gathering and espionage fund.” Nixon campaign manager Clark McGregor was so frustrated with reporters that he accused the press of acting politically, stating, “the Post has maliciously sought to give the appearance of a direct connection between the White House and the Watergate, a charge the Post knows—and a half dozen investigations have found—to be false.”
And then there was McGovern, who made Nixon’s corruption a major theme in his final months on the campaign trail. In his acceptance speech at the Democratic Convention, McGovern said, “From secrecy and corruption in high places, come home, America.” In late September, during visits to three states on the East Coast, McGovern called Nixon “scandal-ridden” and “corrupt.” Speaking to labor leaders in Atlantic City, he warned that “If we let this Nixon-Agnew administration have another four years, I think they’ll make Warren G. Harding look like a Sunday school teacher.” McGovern called the Nixon administration the “trickiest, most deceitful” in U.S. history. On Oct. 17, he told a rally in Fort Worth, Texas, that Nixon was attempting to “escape responsibility” for the break-in and, in the process, “polluting the faith of the American people in government itself.”
McGovern’s emphasis on corruption intensified in the final weeks of his campaign. “As the net of truth closes tighter and tighter around the president himself,” he said, “they try to persuade us that the spying, and lying, and burglary, and sabotage will not affect the election because people expect these things of politicians.” If voters chose Nixon, he said, they would be selecting four years of “Watergate corruption.”
The problem was that McGovern was running against the wind. In mid-October, Gallup found that a minute percentage of Americans ranked corruption as a top issue; only 52 percent had even heard of the Watergate affair. The public concluded that both parties were equally corrupt, so it didn’t matter who was in office.
Nixon defeated McGovern by winning 49 states, including a sweep of the South, and 60.7 percent of the vote.
Today, the warning signs about Trump are all in broad daylight.
The first threat is Trump’s embrace of election denialism. The former president demonstrated that he is willing to destabilize the democratic system when election results don’t go his way. Multiple investigations have unpacked the systematic campaign by Trump and his allies to overturn the 2020 election, which culminated in the violence of Jan. 6, 2020. Since the insurrection, Trump has continued to deny the outcome—as did Sen. J.D. Vance during his debate against Gov. Tim Walz, when he refused to acknowledge that Joe Biden won. Moreover, the Trump campaign has made several strategic moves, such as supporting a change of rules by Trump-allied members of the Georgia State Election Board that will make it easier for local officials to question and delay the counting of ballots; this could easily create a certification crisis.
During his time in office, Trump refused to accept that there were limitations on what a president could do. Surrounded by advisors who believed in the unitary executive theory, Trump did what he wanted to do until someone was able to stop him. Formal or informal guardrails were not his thing. Trump’s expansive, and dangerous, views of presidential power were clear during the first impeachment trial when the United States learned how he had threatened congressionally appropriated aid to Ukraine if Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky did not agree to help dig up dirt on Biden and his son. Trump and his supporters were very clear that he will flex even more of that muscle should he be given another chance to do so. He has often spoken in public about collapsing the firewall that has separated the president from the Justice Department since Nixon’s downfall, and he has threatened to use that prosecutorial power to go after his opponents. In one Truth Social post about Smith’s investigation, Trump said that there would be “repercussions far greater than anything that Biden or his Thugs could understand.” Written by many high-level officials in Trump’s operation, including Stephen Miller, Project 2025 is a 900-page road map to a massive expansion of executive power.
Finally, Trump poses a serious risk to human rights. Between 2017 and 2021, undocumented immigrants were subject to intense and inhumane punitive measures, such as the separation of families, in an effort to disincentivize border crossings. In response to #BlackLivesMatter, Trump asked former Defense Secretary Mark Esper about shooting civil rights protesters in 2020. He famously had peaceful protesters in Lafayette Park cleared out with tear gas all so that he could get a photo-op. Finally, he was the instrumental force behind the creation of the 6-3 majority on the Supreme Court that overturned Roe v. Wade.
The United States paid a high price for its decision in 1972. Nixon’s second term was consumed by the Watergate scandal, which rocked U.S. politics, traumatized and divided the nation, and resulted in decades of deep distrust of government. In 2024, will voters heed the warning signs?
The post When American Voters Ignored the Warning Signs appeared first on Foreign Policy.
