All the President's Men by Carl Bernstein

“Both Nixon and Trump created a conspiratorial world in which the US constitution, laws and fragile democratic traditions were to be manipulated or ignored, political opponents and the media were ‘enemies,’ and there were few or no restraints on the powers entrusted to presidents,” Woodward and Bernstein say in their new foreword. Misinformation also unites the diabolical pair. That informed Trump’s campaign to hold on to power through falsehoods even in the face of defeat. He is finished when he quits,” Nixon told himself in 1969. “A man is not finished when he is defeated. Nixon’s belief that it was for the greater good that he stayed in power whatever the means was “embraced by Trump”, they write. Woodward and Bernstein suggest that the two presidents had much in common, despite the almost half a century that stands between them. It comes just days before the House select committee investigating the January 6 insurrection stages the first of at least six televised hearings in which they will attempt to show the American people that Trump acted corruptly in his efforts to stop Biden’s certification. The timing of their analysis is also potent. In separate capacities, the two journalists have also reported extensively on the Trump presidency, with Woodward doing so in a series of three books: Fear, Rage and Peril. Woodward and Bernstein’s comparison of Trump and Nixon carries singular weight, given that as young Washington Post reporters they helped to uncover Nixon’s campaign of political spying and cover-up that led in 1974 to the only resignation of a president in American history. They write in their foreword, published by the Washington Post, they write: “By legal definition this is clearly sedition … thus Trump became the first seditious president in our history.”

All the President's Men by Carl Bernstein