Contents of said letter from daily beast: https://archive.is/YFBK3#selection-773.0-779.748
“Dear Jonas,” the president wrote to Norway’s prime minister, Jonas Gahr Støre. “Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America. Denmark cannot protect that land from Russia or China, and why do they have a ‘right of ownership’ anyway? There are no written documents, it’s only that a boat landed there hundreds of years ago, but we had boats landing there, also. I have done more for NATO than any other person since its founding, and now, NATO should do something for the United States. The World is not secure unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland. Thank you! President DJT.”
Watching Futurama and hearing them say that Nixon was the worst president in history AND alternate history is hard to watch now. The writers get a lot of things right, but Trump completely breaks that joke in a heartbreaking way.
My guess is that it had something to do with the age of the writers? Nixon really broke the mold, I guess.
A lot of things happened in the 60s and 70s that broke a lot of cherished myths of post-war America. Seeing JFK and RFK getting assassinated. MLK getting assassinated. Pentagon Papers. An incredibly painful economy. Oil embargoes. Then Nixon and Watergate…then the Church Committee. I’m assuming if they were to do a word association, they’d probably associate Nixon with all or most of this stuff. It definitely made an impression on the boomer mindset.
But Ronnie Raygun was far worse than Nixon. I think at that point, the boomers (and their parents) were just sick of all the bad news and conservative corruption and mostly tuned it out. The media mostly turned away entirely from the Iran/Contra affair.
And of course Bush Senior and W were not exactly great.
And now there’s Taco…
If you ever try to tell someone the publicly released undisputed facts of the Iran-Contra affair, you will come across like a conspiracy nut because what happened is so utterly absurdly criminal and yet there were virtually no consequences for anyone involved. One fall guy went to jail for a while and then came out as a Fox News correspondent.
“The famously conservative president of the United States illegally sold weapons to a radical Islamist terrorist organization in Iran (the US’s mortal enemy in the middle east) and then used the proceeds to fund Central American guerrilla fighters that were also narcoterrorists? And nothing much ever came of it? Hah, as if!”
Yeah. I mean I understand that for a very large population - the boomers - the Watergate thing was extremely formative for the time. But when someone tries to tell me that Iran/Contra was not as bad as Watergate? I just don’t get that. It’s just like what you say - it sounds like some wild-eyed black helicopter thing when you read it out loud. It also reads like a rather salacious Hollywood plot when you add in that Ollie North, decades later - in 2025 - married the secretary (Fawn Hall) that helped him shred documents…Fawn Hall also dated Rob Lowe because he saw her in the trial…and she was offered lots of money to pose nude.
Ever since Watergate, a -gate is added to every scandal, even after Iran/Contra, even though Iran/Contra seems remarkably worse. I guess at that point, the boomers and the Silent Generation were jaded and had PTSD by so many things that came before, but…wow. Also, Gen X is a much smaller set of people, so their opinion on it or impressions didn’t really matter, and Gen Y was much too young or not born.