Jill Wine-Banks has no doubt about who she believes is the worst president out of Richard Nixon and Donald Trump.
“They are both bad,” the former Watergate prosecutor told MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell on Monday. “But there is no question in my mind that Donald Trump is a much more existential threat to democracy than Richard Nixon was.”
Continued Wine-Banks:
I mean, you talk about vindictive and the purges. I would say that Nixon was vindictive and he retaliated against anyone he saw as not being loyal to him. But he didn’t pull out people from the government, he didn’t replace them with people who would do his bidding like Attorney General (William) Barr and so many others, and that’s what Donald Trump is doing, which hurts the institutions of government and really threatens democracy in a way that Nixon didn’t.
Wine-Banks, whose new book “The Watergate Girl” documents the role she played on the prosecution team during the Watergate scandal, also pointed out how the system actually worked when it came to holding Nixon to account.
“He ended up resigning, he was forced out of office,” she noted, a stark contrast to current events where, following the GOP-controlled Senate’s vote to acquit Trump of abusing his power and stonewalling Congress in the Ukraine scandal, Republicans are declaring the president to be “not guilty.”
Check out the interview above.