Trump is Nixon 2.0
And DOGE is like CREEP, but on steroids.
My latest essay for The Dispatch compares the lawlessness of Donald Trump and Richard Nixon. Both are petty, paranoid men with an unhealthy fixation on their critics and willing to deploy lawless force to punish them. I’ll post an excerpt below, but do check out the full, ungated version.
Like Nixon and CREEP, Trump has his own team of loyal operatives willing to bend or break the law in order to root out his internal enemies. Officially, Trump tasked the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) with finding trillions of dollars in waste, fraud, and abuse by federal agencies. Despite its name, DOGE is not an actual executive department; it subsumed the U.S. Digital Service, an IT consulting task force that was a holdover from the Obama administration and which was created to update computer systems, not take over and audit federal agencies. Regardless, teams including teenagers and young 20-somethings operating out of DOGE’s offices, which are just a few hundred feet from the old headquarters of CREEP, have illicitly raided federal agencies including USAID, Treasury, and the IRS to gain access to their internal databases.
One key difference between the two is that DOGE is operating at a scale that CREEP could only have dreamed of. Instead of a handful of Cuban expatriates breaking into DNC headquarters at the Watergate hotel and riffling through filing cabinets, DOGE has been systematically vacuuming up the records of millions of Americans. Remember, Nixon’s operatives were hunting for information that could embarrass his enemies and foment his political agenda. DOGE is doing the same by attempting to surface stories of woke DEI excess to embarrass Trump’s enemies and foment his political agenda. (Several of these stories have since been discredited or found to be exaggerated.)