Is Trump the new Nixon? - WCAX.COM Local Vermont News, Weather and Sports-

Our Democratic Political Analyst Steve Terry is not the first person to compare President Donald Trump and President Richard Nixon. But he had what he calls a "ringside seat" for the Watergate scandal and Nixon's resignation. He was working for Vermont Sen. George Aiken back then and he sees some parallels with what's happening in Washington now. Terry spoke with our Kristin Kelly about it.

"I drove Senator Aiken to the White House," Terry said.

It was the night before President Nixon resigned. Terry was the senator's legislative assistant and says he waited outside the White House while Sen. Aiken and a handful of other people met privately with the president.

"Came out of the meeting and I drove him back to Capitol Hill and he told me that it was a very emotional meeting. Not as much over the fact that Nixon was going to resign because almost all the people in that room had advised him that he just had to do it. But apparently, President Nixon spent a large part of that meeting very emotional and in tears talking to them about his sainted Quaker mother and how he-- he Nixon-- would have really disappointed her and how bad he felt about that as opposed to anything else," Terry recalled.

Terry was in his 20s back then, tracking the troop levels in Vietnam for the senator and slipping into the Watergate hearings down the hall from his office when he could.

Reporter Kristin Kelly: So to see that kind of upheaval and unrest and the government become so torn up at that time in your life, what was that like?

Steve Terry: It was like going to work every day, and then, of course, there was not social media or Facebook. But every day you'd pick up The New York Times or The Washington Post and maybe in the afternoon the Washington Star and there would be a new bombshell revelation. And it just kept building.

You just didn't know what to expect the next day. Like you almost now don't know when you wake up in the morning what the Trump tweet will be at half past four in the morning. It-- so it felt to me that we are beginning to see some real parallels.

Trump is a master, though, of the media. Richard Nixon certainly was not.

And how the media is doubling down on covering stuff and adding frankly more staff to do it-- even the print media which has had a tough time-- it demonstrates to me that these two forces are building for yet another monumental confrontation.

Steve Terry wrote a commentary about his thoughts on those Nixon-Trump parallels. It's appearing in local print and online media outlets this week.