"While writing “Richard Nixon: The Life,” John A. Farrell could not possibly have known who would be president on the day his fine book was published. That it happens to be Donald J. Trump is, for him, an extraordinary stroke of luck. To read this biography with an eye only toward the parallels between the two presidents would be lazy and unfair, a disservice to Farrell’s nuanced scholarship.
But the context here is unignorable. The similarities between Nixon and Trump leap off the page like crickets.
There is, first and most superficially, their nonpresidential looks — Trump with his roosterly combover, Nixon with jowls so low they formed an A-frame with his nose. More substantively, there’s the matter of their Old Testament fury at the news media. (“The press is the enemy,” Nixon told his aides. “Write that on the blackboard 100 times and never forget it.”)
What else? Their thin skin. Their skyscraping paranoia. Their cavernous memory for slights. It’s hard to think of two modern presidents with a more dire case of political hemophilia. Once wounded, these men never stop bleeding.
Like Trump, Nixon was a monomaniac on the stump, obsessed with the enemies lurking within. Nixon, too, had a penchant for sowing mayhem and a gourmand’s appetite for revenge, especially in the wee hours of the morning. (Trump tweets. Nixon made phone calls.)"
More here. NY Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/29/book ... ottom-well
