Word from the White House is that Donald Trump is turning pink (or orangy pink) at the mere mention of Richard Nixon. It seems, at the very end of a presidency in which he got so many things monumentally wrong (“The virus […] will go away in April”), Donald Trump is at least right on at least one final point. People need to stop comparing him to the 37th president.
Nixon has become the go-to cliché when referencing any manner of political corruption. The suffix “-gate” remains the laziest way to name a scandal because it is so ignorant of the fact that Watergate was unique in scale and complexity to the Nixon years. Arguably, the only reasonable use of “-gate” is when it’s done ironically, to make a ridiculously trivial scandal sound ridiculously grand, such as “Sharpiegate” when Trump doctored maps to support his belief that Hurricane Dorian would hit Alabama in 2019.
