Nixon was smarter, more adept at politics, and more malicious than Trump at least in regards to the larger picture items. Trump is a narcissistic, small minded criminal. Trump has one MAJOR (in ways that cannot be overestimated) advantage that Nixon lacked, and this is not anything internal to Trump who is really just an ignorant bigot who understands how to use this one advantage.
The advantage that Trump has is a whole media ecosystem designed to carry right wing messaging and force it into the mainstream. Again, this cannot be overstated. Nixon was capable of so much more malice and treachery, but he had to contend with a media that at the time was still predicated somewhat on serving the public good and Nixon HATED that. So did his media consultant Roger Ailes who with Nixon were formulating what Ailes would later introduce, almost 20 years later as Fox News.
Seriously, without Fox News and the right wing media system that it has spawned, Trump would be a fringe element character or maybe would have remained a failed celebrity business person. To be sure, there were right wing thinkers and commentators like William F Buckley Jr. who had his National Review all the way back in 1955, but it was easy to identify what was Right Wing, Left Wing, and Mainstream. Everyone operated on the same set of facts and the difference was in the interpretation of those facts. Buckley Jr would debate Gore Vidal and James Baldwin among others, about the ins and outs of the conservative v. liberal viewpoint, but they argued from the same information. Fox News turned that paradigm on its ear and now a conservative can go, and mostly chooses to go their whole life only hearing information that conforms to their way of thinking.
The Fox playbook has had such an out sized impact that you have the mainstream media scrambling to include the conservative viewpoint as "just another point of view" so that they do not appear biased. Had Nixon had the level of media support that Fox New has created for the right wing today, he would have done unspeakable things to the United States. He just had no support from the media or from his own party in the end. Republicans in Nixon's time understood that the Saturday Night Massacre and the exposure of the tapes showing Nixon's knowledge and cover up of the Watergate break in were bad for the country and bad for the Republican Party and so aided in his removal from office. Republicans today either believe because they consume right wing media, or have to contend with (because their constituents consume only right wing media) the fact that Trump maintains a rabidly loyal base that can create problems for them in their primaries and the general election. They are either complicit in the lies and cover up, or they are scared to do anything for fear of retribution.
Look at any right wing site or the posts of your right wing friends/former friends and family members on Facebook, Twitter, or other social media and you will see that there is a whole segment of American society that appears to be receiving their own "set of facts" which are completely detached from reality. This is what allows Trump to operate the way he has. It isn't his smarts, media savvy, or any other internal quality. It is that he has a whole system designed to promote his message.
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