1977 Nixon Interviews
Please consider the Nixon Interviews in 1977.
Nixon spent more than two years away from public life after resigning from office in 1974, but he granted British journalist David Frost Frost an exclusive series of interviews in 1977.
Nixon’s chief of staff Jack Brennan negotiated the terms of the interview with Frost. Nixon’s staff saw the interview as an opportunity for the disgraced president to restore his reputation with the public and assumed that Frost would be easily outwitted.
The premiere episode drew 45 million viewers, the largest television audience for a political interview in history — a record that still stands today.
In part 3, Frost asked Nixon about the legality of the president’s actions. In the context of American national security, Nixon replied: “Well, when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.“
Trump Tweets April 13, 2020
The following video conversation also took place on April 13. It’s in reference to Trump’s claims made in the above Tweets .
Trump: “When somebody is president of the United States, the authority is total. And that’s the way it’s got to be.“
Reporter 1: “Total?”
Trump: “It’s total. the governors know that. You have a couple of bands of Democrat governors but they will agree to it.“
Reporter 2: “You said when someone is president of the United States, their authority is total. That is not true.”
Trump: “You know what we are going to do. We’re going to write up papers on this, it’s not going to be necessary because the governors need us one way or the other.”
Please play the video. Trump had a chance to walk back his Tweets and instead he doubled down with a veiled threat against states that would not comply.
Comparison
- Trump 2020: “When somebody is president of the United States, the authority is total. And that’s the way it’s got to be.”
- Nixon 1977: “Well, when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.”
Governors Object
More than a couple of governors Object.
The governors of Washington, California and Oregon announced they’ll work together to re-open their economies while continuing to control the spread of COVID-19.
Live updates: https://t.co/GOIqyYX9wD
— The Seattle Times (@seattletimes) April 13, 2020
Pennsylvania and Six Northeast States Chime In
Also note Pennsylvania One Of Seven States To Work Together On COVID-19 Plans For Reopening
In neither case did the states offer Trump a say in the decision.
I cannot see Republican governors going along with this unconstitutional power grab. Then again, as we all know, “when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.”
After this monstrous fiasco, Trump may wait for the governors to pick dates, then pick the same dates with a further declaration it was all his idea.
How these video clips look in a national election is another matter.
Mike “Mish” Shedlock
Sure, that was the not so veiled threat he made … should really boost his popularity when he resorts to extortion to force states to do the emperor’s bidding by withholding funding in the middle of a pandemic.
Trump does not have the constitutional authority to order the states to open up.
What power he does have, which is almost as powerful as constitutional authority, is the ability to withhold funds from states that do not comply.
He ran for the wrong office if he wanted real authority over a state. His authority is fake. Just like him. Oh the irony.
Well picking the only president to resign after being impeached is a rather low bar. Even then, Nixon is arguing that he shouldn’t have to go to live in a cage for the things he did, not that he had the power to do whatever he wanted. The trend has been that the presidency has increased its power since congress has abdicated so many of his responsibilities such as war powers, oversight and prudent budgeting.
The current president may reverse that trend since very few take him seriously anymore.
I think Cuomo is onto something with the schizoid diagnosis. I’ve noticed this for a while and may be wrong, but watch how T repeats what he considers important 3 times as if it is magical:
‘When somebody is the president of the United States, the authority is total and that’s the way it’s gonna be. It’s total. It’s total.
I think there may be voices telling him to do that. And not from the people standing behind him.
See this picture where he points to the actual problem:
If only Mr. T would repeat “Candyman” 3 times in the mirror while shaving in the morning …
mish, you need to cut back on your cnn time. you are much better at market issues.
I’m sure you can find a nice safe space somewhere else.
The New Yorker suggests governors need to form a country:
The west coast would prosper without the red state burden.
They sure should. As should mayors. Aim for a thousand independent nations.
Plus minus a few is perhaps no biggie
Anthropologists have long recognized groups larger than about a hundred or a few makes keeping tabs on leaders problematic. Hence decreases trust and increases infighting. Hinting representative rule starts running into similar issues at the square of that; since each representative can then no longer be expected to keep tab on the leaders they in turn elect.
So, since we are all aspiring to be a “technological” society these days, to make binary computing simple, aim for 255^2. Or around 65000, for the size of each polity. Whether to make that 65000 people period, 65000 adults, 65000 military aged adults, 65000 military aged adult males, 65000 adult males, who cares. Just keep it close to 65000.
For empirical “verification”, Andorra didn’t have an income tax until straight up forced to by the kleptocrats in the EU and US being uncomfortable with such an obvious demonstration that slaves neither need nor benefit from the “services” Massa provides. Ditto once fairly independent Swiss cantons.
The last remnants of Freemen, those hardy Afghans, also seem to cluster in villages around the hundred to a few in size. And send representatives to village councils for coordination beyond that. Above that village council level, it doesn’t seem like they care to coordinate much at all, unless invaded by an obvious external enemy. Instead deferring to Law settled a millennium ago, instead of letting whichever clown manages to set up shop in some “capital,” arbitrarily make laws up for his own benefit.
Trump needs to be talking to a psychiatrist for a couple hours a day to work out his problems, not use a country in crisis to respond to what his father did to him.
“Well, when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.”
Presidents can pardon people of Federal crimes so that does put them a little above the law.
The Constitution has an exception to this power “in Cases of Impeachment” but it has never been made clear whether this applies only to the impeachment itself or to prosecution after he leaves office.
So far according to today’s corona 19 data:
99.823% of the US population has not gotten the virus, and…
99.993% of the US population did not die from the virus yet.
So… at this rate we need to be locked for how much longer? Just wondering, that’s all.
Less than 1% of the US population has been tested. By the latest numbers, just over 19.9% of tested people were positive (587,155 / 2,943,955).
I thought “just the flu, bro” had gone out of fashion, but if you’re going to declare victory you should probably wait until the new daily cases drops below 25K and daily deaths drop below 1500.
not the flu, instead it’s categorized as a cold virus… That is where it gets complicated. I expect we are going to see it quickly re-emerge before July, then what?
“…just over 19.9% of tested people were positive (587,155 / 2,943,955)”
Were the ‘tested people’ randomly sampled or were they suspected of having the virus?
Probably suspected, so we can’t extrapolate that number over the general population. Still it’s going to be a lot higher than a fraction of one percent.
“Still it’s going to be a lot higher than a fraction of one percent.”
Yes, and that could be a good sign for the fatality rate. If it’s really high, there is no sense in trying to avoid it, IMAO.
There are many reasons: to lower the number of cases occurring in a short time frame to keep hospitals from being overwhelmed and raising death rates; to allow time for resupply of PPE, equipment, and medical personnel who would die in a surge of the virus; to allow more time for either vaccine or treatment developments that would come out of the experience of manageable first- and second-wave virus infections.
The first wave hasn’t ended yet, a lot of countries are still on the upside of the curve.
It would be nice if we could get reliable data out of China to see how it looks on a longer timeline, but alas. The best we’ve got is probably South Korea, where they aggressively tested and tried to isolate positive cases.
I would include Taiwan in the good category, but their numbers are suspiciously lower than Singapore and Hong Kong, which also have close ties to China but much lower populations. There is so much lying out there that it’s difficult to gauge what’s coming.
I can understand the suspicion over Taiwan’s numbers, they are ridiculously low, but as someone who’s been living here for many years, the government’s response to this has been so on top of it from the first hint of a new virus at the end of December, not only do I trust the numbers, it has made me re-think a lot of my american ideas about what government is capable of. We get a daily brief from the head of the Central Epidemic Command Center, patiently answering all questions with not a politician in sight, explaining each new case and the likely source of infection. The contact tracing, the enforcement of quarantine (and support provided to those in quarantine) … the proactive measures to close off travel from certain areas (at this point no non-citizens / non-residents are even allowed in, including no airport transfers; and those allowed in have 14 days of home isolation), and to make sure masks are widely available … Taiwan has not done widespread testing because it hasn’t needed to, there is so far no sign of serious local transmission (knock wood). I could go on and on, as I say it has kind of blown my mind, anyway my point is there are many reasons for Taiwan’s low numbers but I don’t think dishonesty is one of them.
Good to hear, I’ll take your word for it as a resident. I only know one guy in Taipei and I haven’t spoken to him since last summer.
Taiwan deserves to be mentioned with SK then, and maybe HK and Singapore were comparatively unlucky or they had more Hubei visitors in the early days.
No, hk and singapore did not have more hubei visitors, singapore’s numbers started shooting up in mid march, long after it shut out visitors from hubei and implemented strict quarantine for all residents returning from china. The spike is the result of residents started coming back in droves from the us and europe and the people making policies did not know how serious the problems were in the us and eu. In short, they got it from you folks.
From where I’m sitting the question is more whether South Korea deserves to be mentioned with Taiwan 🙂 — I see so many comments from the US about how SK is the model … I guess they are a great model for what to do if you’ve already let the horses out of the barn; but Taiwan is the real model for this, saw what was going on (and knew they couldn’t trust what China was saying about it) and shut the barn doors quickly.
for those looking for numbers from a random test of the population here are the results from Germany. It’s only a sample of 1000 in an outbreak area, but it’s better than the current “only test suspects” method
The upshot: case fatality is looking around 0.4% (4X higher than the flu)
and for everyone 1 person with symptoms, there are 4 without.
All in all, not a big deal for low-risk people on an individual basis. But considering the contagiousness, it’s a big deal society-wide. My GF is in the EXTREMELY HIGH-RISK category, and with young kids too. So remember for 99.4% of the population, it’s not about you; it’s about them.
In other power grab news, the Michigan governor won’t even allow lawn care businesses to operate, a Mississippi town mayor shut down a drive-in church service, and many states have closed their parks because “people don’t know how to properly social distance, so we must help them…”
Good grief.
Kaitlin Jenner is Michigan’s Queen Governor.
Hey it’s only Trump.
Don’d worry’boudit.
And he don’t sound like Nixon eddah.