Okay, a serious question re: people insulting admin staffers

[grumpyduck]

I don't want to derail the other threads on this topic, so here's a serious question for those of you who have followed politics or the news for a number of years.

Are there any documented cases of previous presidents resorting to the same type and volume of verbal or written attacks or insults on people they didn't agree with, as with the current president? We know LBJ, Nixon, and others occasionally blasted someone, but it was mostly in WH meetings or private settings. They all probably did that. But I'm asking specifically about things they said or wrote in public, to a similar degree.

No opinions here, please. There are lots of other threads for that. As Sgt. Friday used to say, "Just the facts, ma'am."

[mahatmakanejeeves]

1. No. This is all new territory. NT

[Sneederbunk]

3. And we are each adapting in our own way.

[The Blue Flower]

2. No, they respected the power of the office

This has never happened before.

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

4. No, I've never seen anything like this.

Whatever other presidents might have said about various people was almost always kept private - sometimes occasionally leaked, but not intended for public consumption. Obama famously roasted Trump at a WH correspondents' dinner (which is said to be a major reason for Trump's grudge), but roasting is what happens there and is expected. But I can't think of any instances where any president made a point of publicly insulting people, including private citizens, just because they disagreed with him.

[KT2000]

5. No - hot mics

were big stories when someone swore or called another politician a name.

[DemocratSinceBirth]

6. NO

Trump is the first president to continually disrespect his opposition and shower them with invective, unearned ridicule, and scorn.

[dixiegrrrrl]

7. Yes...it did happen before.

Nixon sent Spiro Agnew to publicly criticize protesters and people who criticized Nixon, esp. attacking the press.

The context of this is important to know, because it led to where we are today.

Agnew, while speaking to the California Republican state convention on September 11, 1970: “In the United States today, we have more than our share of the nattering nabobs of negativism. They have formed their own 4-H Club — the ‘hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history.'”

While the phrase is generally attributed to Agnew, it was actually written by White House speechwriter William Safire.

Will Bunch: “The words that William Safire penned and that Spiro Agnew mouthed actually had enormous impact that has lasted until this day. They helped foster among conservatives and the folks that Nixon called ‘the silent majority’ a growing mistrust of the mainstream media, a mistrust that grew over two generations into a form of hatred. It also started a dangerous spiral of events — journalists started bending backwards to kowtow to their conservative critics, beginning in the time of Reagan, an ill-advised shift that did not win back a single reader or viewer on the right. Instead, it caused a lot of folks on the left and even the center to wonder why the national media had stopped doing its job, stopped questioning authority.”

https://politicaldictionary.com/words/nattering-nabobs-of-negativism/

That anti-press attitude is what led to the WaPo publication of the Pentagon Papers and to the press investigation of Watergate.

[flotsam]

8. Agnew:

"This is the criminal left that belongs not in a dormitory, but in a penitentiary. The criminal left is not a problem to be solved by the Department of Philosophy or the Department of English—it is a problem for the Department of Justice…. Black or white, the criminal left is interested in power. It is not interested in promoting the renewal and reforms that make democracy work; it is interested in promoting those collisions and conflict that tear democracy apart."
Speech at a Florida Republican dinner, Fort Lauderdale, Florida (April 28, 1970); reported in Collected Speeches of Spiro Agnew (1971), p. 135.
Quotes about Agnew

[dixiegrrrrl]

11. Yes...thank you for finding that.

For those who might now know... Agnew set a record.

Less than a year before Richard M. Nixon’s resignation as president of the United States, Spiro Agnew becomes
the first U.S. vice president to resign in disgrace.
.....he pleaded no contest to a charge of federal income tax evasion in exchange for the dropping of charges of political corruption. He was subsequently fined $10,000, sentenced to three years probation, and disbarred by the Maryland court of appeals.

https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/vice-president-agnew-resigns

Which answers the question about indicting a sitting Vice-President.

[gratuitous]

9. Office holders have a long history of slagging on their critics

But the individualized, personal attacks on people by the president is pretty much all Trump. I'm sure there have been instances of presidents expressing pique with individual members of Congress or other public figures, but Trump has made it a centerpiece of his administration to attack not just office holders, but reporters and private citizens. It almost seems quaint now to remember Richard Nixon taking Dan Rather to task for asking a question ("Are you running for something?" ), but that was a spur-of-the-moment burst of Nixonian irritation; Trump's ongoing personal attack campaign is entirely different.

[Recursion]

10. The tech kind of makes it different

The partisan press of the 1800s was worse than Breitbart in a lot of ways, but they could print and deliver one, maybe two issues a day. Today Trump can be sitting on his golden toilet and insult seven people in 140 characters, twice a minute, 24/7.