In his November 20, 2023, substack post Thom Hartmann made a remarkable statement. He said that Dwight Eisenhower was the last Republican president who won an honest election. He was also the last who “believed in democracy, the rule of law, and that government should prioritize what the people want”. All the GOP presidents since have either cheated, often to the point of treason, or inherited it from one who did.
Let’s look
at each one.
The first was Richard Nixon who took millions in bribes while VP to Eisenhower. He ran for president in 1960 against John Kennedy and was trailing in the polls. In 1959 Fidel Castro had just taken over Cuba from the dictator Batista who was a friend of Nixon (and of Nixon’s mafia friends). Castro came to the US looking for economic aid for his country but Nixon turned him down so Castro turned to Khrushchev, leader of the USSR. Kennedy used this - turning Cuba communist - against Nixon in the presidential campaign. To counter this attack Nixon tried to have Castro overthrown, making him (Nixon) a hero in time for the election. The plot failed and so did Nixon’s presidential run.
Nixon tried
again in 1968 running against Hubert Humphrey who was Lyndon Johnson’s VP.
Johnson had been working hard on a peace deal to end the Vietnam War and had an
agreement ready to sign that fall. Nixon sent his men to South Vietnam and
offered them a better deal if they would wait until after the election. Johnson
learned about this (from the FBI) 3 days before the election but didn’t say
anything publicly while privately calling it treason. Nixon won the election
and the Vietnam War dragged on until 1975 killing an additional 22,000 American
troops and more than 1 million Vietnamese.
Nixon’s VP
Spiro Agnew resigned rather than face prosecution for taking bribes and was
replaced by Gerald Ford. He became
president in 1974 when Nixon resigned to avoid impeachment over the Watergate scandal.
Ford was never elected.
Ronald Reagan was the next to commit treason to win the
presidency. During the 1980 election
campaign President Jimmy Carter had finally reached a deal with the Iranian
President to release 52 hostages held for nearly a year at the American Embassy
in Tehran. Reagan made a clandestine deal with Ayatollah Khomeini, the leader
of Iran’s radical faction, to keep the hostages until after the election. In
return Reagan offered parts for the American weapons that Iran had purchased.
This became known later as the Iran/Contra Scandal. Partly because of the
hostages, Reagan won the election and the hostages were released the very
minute Reagan was inaugurated.
George H. W. Bush was VP under Reagan and became president in
1988, defeating Michael Dukakis. There was no criminal trick involved in
winning this election but he would never have been president without Reagan’s
Contra deal (and Bush's racist Willie Horton ad no doubt helped). The Contra
affair followed Bush Sr. into his presidency. Secretary of Defense Casper Weinberger,
member of the National Security Council Oliver North, and others were indicted
and convicted on a number of charges. Bush, as VP at the time of the contra
affair, was subpoenaed and could be facing prison. Bush’s Attorney General Bill Barr
(yes THAT Bill Barr) suggested Bush pardon all the conspirators, thus ending
the investigation.
George W. Bush was next in 2000 running against Al Gore. The election came down to who won in Florida and it was close. The first count had Bush over Gore by 537 votes out of 5.8 million. I mentioned in my February 26 post on election fraud how Bush’s brother, Florida Governor Jed Bush, had purged 57,000 mostly Black legitimate voters just before the election. There was also an issue about the confusing design of some of the ballots which favored Bush. A recount was underway on order of the Florida Supreme Court when Bush asked the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene to stop it. The 5-4 vote on December 12 ended the count gaving Florida and the presidency to Bush. Justice Antonin Scalia’s son was a lawyer representing Bush in this trial and Justice Clarence Thomas’ wife was working on the Bush transition team - neither Scalia or Thomas recused themselves from the case. A later recount by a group of newspapers found that Gore had actually won. Had Gore won, America would not have started two illegal wars (Iraq and Afghanistan) and 9/11 may not have happened. And there would have been a lot more progress in slowing global warming.
Donald Trump is just the latest in a series of cheating Republican
presidents. There was no big Republican scandal but several significant smaller
ones that added up to a victory in 2016. The big scandal in 2016 was “Hillary
Clinton’s emails”. The FBI had concluded there was no criminal intent but then
just 11 days before the election FBI Director James Comey announced they were
opening the case again (and dropped it again right after the election). Who pressured him to do that I wonder?
Russian
interference was a big factor in the 2026 election as detailed in the Mueller
report. Because Mueller did not find enough evidence to indict anyone, Barr
made it sound like the report exonerated Trump, which it definitely did not. Most
Republicans still believe that it wasn’t Russia but Ukraine interfering in the
election; that story of course originated in Moscow. Without more voter purges
Trump would not have been elected in either 2016 or 2024.
Hartmann
wrote that article before the 2024 election but the guest post by Greg Palast
in the January 24 2025 Hartmann Report argues that Trump would have lost in
2024 without the illegal voting purges and other tricks used by the Republicans.
None of these
treasonous GOP presidents were ever held to account for their actions.
These
illegitimate Republican presidents did a lot of damage to American democracy
directly while in office. But their actions that have had the most long lasting
damage was to appoint anti-democratic judges to the Supreme Court. I will
outline their most damaging decisions of the past 45 years another day.
And if you
are following the news at all, you will know that what Donald Trump is doing
now is completely destroying what little of democracy is left in America.
Source:
https://hartmannreport.com/p/four-presidents
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