Chris Wallace Likens Donald Trump's 'Dangerous Character' To This Fictional Villain
HuffPost
The veteran news anchor said Monday that Trump's sense of injustice about the U.S. political system could lead to another Watergate scandal — or worse.
Chris Wallace drew some striking parallels Monday between the “origin story” of former Presidents Donald Trump and Richard Nixon and the Joker — whose anarchist ethos as a fictional Batman villain Wallace likened to Trump’s volatile resentment of the justice system.
The veteran news anchor argues in his new book “Countdown 1960” that Nixon’s loss in the 1960 presidential election against John F. Kennedy only emboldened him to resort to more ruthless tactics, which he equated with Trump on MSNBC’s “Inside With Jen Psaki.”
“Nixon had a reputation as being a dirty politician,” Wallace told the former White House press secretary on her show, per Mediaite. “That’s where he got the nickname Tricky Dick. But, in 1960, he decided to run as a statesman to try to put that all behind him.”
“And some people have suggested to me that maybe his defeat in 1960 and how nicely he played was the origin story of the villain, sort of like the origin story of the Joker,” he continued. “And, clearly, in some of the Watergate tapes, you can hear his anger and his bitterness.”
Nixon lost the 1960 election by one of the thinnest margins in U.S. history. After winning the presidency nearly a decade later, he engaged in illegal wiretapping at the Watergate Hotel to prevent that from happening again — and resigned when this became public.