Once we believed that no President could possibly be worse than Richard “Tricky Dicky” Nixon. How naïve we were.
And Nixon had earned that reputation. There was not only Watergate and all that, but he also did other stuff.
In 1969, a Supreme Court seat opened up while Nixon was President. He nominated a guy from South Carolina named, “Clement Haynesworth” (yes, that was his real name – did I have to tell you that he was from South Carolina?). The Democrats opposed him. They pointed to his lower court decisions that favored segregation. Some of his decisions were also anti-labor. Haynesworth was not confirmed.
Well, Nixon was pissed off. You can imagine his thought process. “How dare they reject me. I’ll show them. I’ll give them an even worse candidate now. They’ll never turn me down twice. Impressed by his own egocentric logic, Nixon found the perfect candidate. His name was G. Harold Carswell.
Mr. Carswell’s past made Haynesworth’s civil rights record worthy of an NAACP award. Carswell had made a speech where he’d said, “I yield to no man, as a fellow candidate or as a fellow citizen, in the firm, vigorous belief in the principles of white supremacy, and I shall always be so governed.” And as if being a racist, wasn’t bad enough, he was also a lousy judge. While he sat in the federal District Court, his decisions had been overturned on appeal about forty per cent of the time.
But Nixon fully expected that this utter incompetent he’d thrown at the system would be approved with ease. The Senate didn’t have the balls to reject two of his candidates in a row. Would it hurt the country? Of course. But it would make this paranoid egomaniac feel better
Nixon underestimated the size of the Senates’ kohonees. They rejected Carswell, too. The Nixon Gambit had been a flop.
As I write this, a few days ago Orange Julius set out along Nixon’s same pathetic path. Having had his horrible candidate for Attorney General, Matt Gaetz, rejected, he decided to implement the Nixon Gambit himself. If they didn’t like Matt Gaetz, hell, let them chew on Kash Patel to head the FBI. Matt may have had very few qualifications to be AG, but Kash has absolutely no qualifications to head the FBI. And then, because the Senate won’t reject me a second time, I’ll have a guy with the greatest law enforcement resources in the world at my beck and call.
The Nixon Gambit didn’t work the first time because there was a Senate that stood up to it. Let’s only hope that today’s Senate will also have the required kohonees and that they, too, will make sure that this version of the Nixon Gambit will also fail.
(Stay tuned for a possible next gambit: “The Hegseth Hazard.”)
We were right 
This is a concerted effort by Trump to throw so much shit against the wall that even if only 10% sticks, he will feel like a winner and a “victim” at the same time. Kash, Tulsi, Pete, and who knows who will follow. This is what we knew all along would happen and the MAGAts thought we were just being paranoid haters.
The only remaining question is whether there’s a handful of Republicans left with an ounce of morals … and, so far, the answer is “highly doubtful”.
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You know him better than I do and your interpretation sounds right. I just wonder if his obsessive need not to lose at anything will prevent him from accepting that much rejection. Thanks for the comment.
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