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TRUMP TODAY, NIXON YESTERDAY

Of all American presidents we Vietnamese Americans have some ideas about, Richard Nixon and Donald Trump may be the most popular. Nixon reigned in the crucial stage of the Vietnam War (1969-74) and undoubtedly had a criminal say in the fall of the Saigon regime in 1975. Trump, the incumbent president, should have gone to Vietnam during the war years had he not had a “bone spur”, which was originated from his hatred of the war. Apart from his “draft deferments”, Trump is now the nicest American president Hanoi has ever known.
In a few ways Trump is comparable to Nixon.
In the 1968 presidential election, Nixon sought help from South Vietnam’s President Nguyen Van Thieu to dump Democratic candidate Vice President Hubert Humphrey’s effort to start early the peace talks with the Viet Congs. He did not do it personally, but sought the help from a Taiwanese-American, Mrs. Anna Chenault, to transmit the message. She used to be a war cơrespondent and also a Republican member of the US-China Lobby. Nixon denied any wrongdoing in this case while President Lyndon Johnson insisted that there must be an investigation. In fact, “Tricky Dick” needed not to do this to defeat Humphrey in the election but he did that anyway because he was too anxious to win at any price.
In Trump’s campaign in 2016, he openly called on President Putin’s Russia to hack Clinton’s server in order to look for dirt in tens of thousands of her erased emails. There’s no doubt that he had full support from Putin in this election. Trump in fact did not have to do this to win the election. Why did he have, or had to look for, Russian help, for which he is still very grateful? There seems to be an implicit understanding of a quid pro quo, and Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe consequently did not exonerate Trump.
In Nixon’s 1972 re-election campaign, he tried to undermine his rival, Senator George MacGovern, with the Watergate break-in. We are still not sure if Nixon had ordered the break-in, but there was no doubt that he had managed the cover-up. This scandal led to the impeachment process and finally his political withdrawal. Obviously, Nixon had won re-election easily. So why did he need the Watergate break-in? He was too anxious, too!
Meanwhile, President Trump brazenly called Ukraine’s President Zelensky to ask him to do him “a favor” – make a dirt-seeking investigation of the Bidens. As a quid pro quo, the U.S., or he, would resume American aid to Ukraine. The call was premature, unnecessary, and highly costly: the impeachment is approaching nearer than ever for this blatant abuse of power.
In January 1973, in accordance with the “Agreement on Ending the War and Restoring Peace” signed with the Viet Congs, Nixon, ignoring Thieu and showing little care for twenty million South Vietnamese, decided to pull out the remaining American troops from South Vietnam (From 1969 to 1972, in his “spontaneous Vietnamization plan”, Nixon had withdrawn more than 500.000 troops), although Communist North Vietnam was allowed to retain its massive troops in the south. That’s exactly why and how South Vietnam lost the war in 1975 and hundreds of thousands of people had to either go to concentration camps or flee the country as boat people. And now we can also witness how torturously and yranically Ha Noi has been ruling Vietnam since the “liberation of the south” 44 years ago.
As far as the Vietnam War is concerned, Trump recently said that “‘Well, I was never a fan of that war. I'll be honest with you. I thought it was a terrible war. I thought it was very far away... At that time, nobody ever heard of the country.” It is really disappointing that now, as a president of the United States, he still has no idea about what the war in “the Free World’s Southeast Asian outpost” meant to the United States in the Cold War era (hope that he understands what the Cold War was about and how many decades it had lasted). He still fails to understand that the ASEAN bloc could not have survived had Saigon fallen in the early sixties, and Saigon could have fallen in 1965 had President Johnson not decided to send ground troops to Da Nang in March 1965.
In fact, the late Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Kwan Yew wrote in his memoir “From Third World to First” about the United States’ decision to intervene in the Vietnam War: “America’s action enabled noncommunist Southeast Asia to put their own houses in order. By 1975, they were in better shape to stand up to the communists. Had there been no U.S. intervention, the will of these countries to resist them would have melted and Southeast Asia would most likely gone communist.” Trump went to Singapore in 2018 to meet North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, but this did not mean that he knows who Lee was and how great he used to be.
In October, still seeking a way to re-affirm his loyal devotion to Putin’s cause in Syria, Trump pulled American troops out of this Middle East country, leaving the playground totally for Russia, and putting at stake the security of more than one million Kurds, the United States’ most active ally in Syria for more than 10 years. Now that the US are gone, Russia and Turkey have freely entered a deal to jointly control the area, ignoring totally the Kurds. As an act of appreciation, Putin is now heaping praise on Trump for the killing of Baghdadi, after Trump has informed him of the raid. Nancy Pelosi did not hear anything abou this from Trump.
In a few ways, Nixon is very different from Trump. Nixon released his tax returns under audit while Trump’s tax returns have been audited in the past many years that he could not make it public. Nixon had virtually no scandal with any lady – not to say someone like Stormy Daniels, to whom Trump had to pay a handsome amount of hush money. Mrs. Nixon is a highly respected lady, and they have two wonderful daughters who were never involved in their father’s business. Trump’s daughter is a “senior adviser” to the president, and her husband is, too.
Nixon had two history-making trips to Beijing and Moscow, paving way for a globalized world. Trump had two shaming trips to Singapore and Hanoi, while he believed in a de-Americanized globe. Nixon was a career politician who understood the need of political civility and when he should withdraw before it was too late. An “apprentice” president has no such knowledge and understanding.

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