NPR reveals Trump planning to use IRS for retribution — just like Nixon

12 May

Donald Trump

Some Americans who have vivid memories of Watergate — including former Watergate prosecutor Jill Wine-Banks and 1970s Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein — aren't shy about saying that when it comes to attacking democracy and the rule of law, President Donald Trump is much worse than the late President Richard Nixon. Trump, according to those Watergate-era veterans, has crossed lines that Nixon wouldn't cross.

In an article published by National Public Radio (NPR) on May 12, reporter Scott Horsley describes a parallel between Trump and Nixon: a willingness to use the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) against political adversaries.

"From utilizing tax data to trace immigrants without legal status to threatening Harvard University's tax exemption, President Trump has been trying to use the IRS for his own political purposes, in ways that may seem unprecedented," Horsley explains. "But they're not. Former President Richard Nixon laid the groundwork more than four decades ago, when he tried to use the tax collector to punish his enemies and assist his friends….. Nixon was angry at universities for not cracking down on Vietnam War protesters; Trump has similarly complained about Harvard and other Ivy League schools not doing more to silence protests against the war in Gaza, amid an administration crackdown on antisemitism on college campuses."

Trump, according to Horsley, is "drawing on Nixon's old playbook, despite laws put in place after Watergate to prevent that kind of meddling by the White House."

Joseph Thorndike, director of the Tax History Project at Tax Analysts, told NPR, "One of the things that Nixon did consider was threatening the tax-exemptions of universities. And that sounds very familiar if you're reading the paper these days…. Nixon tried very hard to misuse the IRS. Congress certainly saw that as a danger afterwards."

Thorndike continued, "If the president is developing enemies lists and sending them to the IRS and essentially saying, 'I want you to audit all these people I don't like,' that's worrisome. And so, Congress was very interested in preventing that."

Oval Office recordings from 1971, Horsley notes, "reveal how Nixon sought to install a hand-picked enforcer at the IRS to do his political bidding."

Nixon, in 1971, said, "I want to be sure he's a ruthless son of a bitch, that he will do what he's told. That every income tax return I want to see, I see. That he'll go after our enemies and not go after our friends. It's as simple as that."

Read the full NPR article at this link.

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