Richard Nixon’s former White House counsel John Dean ripped President Donald Trump in a scathing tweet Sunday, accusing him of making the “long nightmare” of the Watergate scandal now “look like a brief Idyllic daydream.”
He derided the president’s “growing decadence, deviousness and self-delusive behavior.” Dean also said that while Nixon was corrupt, Trump is evil.
In another startling tweet, he indicated that Trump would more likely have been an ally of Adolf Hitler rather than of Winston Churchill — “particularly if he could sell the Nazis a few hotels or condos with his name on them.”
Dean pleaded guilty during the Watergate probe to conspiracy to obstruct justice. But he also gave Senate testimony that was critical in bringing down Nixon for covering up the scandal after a break-in at Democratic National Committee offices at the Watergate office complex in Washington, D.C.
Dean has gone after Trump hard this year.
He quipped in an interview with Rolling Stone that Nixon, who resigned the presidency in 1974, might have remained in the White House if Fox News had existed then to protect him. He also called Trump “the most incompetent person to ever become president,” and accused him of being “not only insecure and erratic, but uninformed, for he doesn’t read history, or know it.”
Dean then appeared pessimistic about Trump ever resigning or being removed from office for misconduct because of the political climate.
But more recently, he has expressed more optimism with the arrest of Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, and after White House counsel Don McGahn’s cooperation with special investigator Robert Mueller. McGahn did the “right thing,” Dean said in August.
After it was revealed in September that Manafort had decided to cooperate with Mueller as part of a plea deal, Dean tweeted: “BOOM!”