Source: Dawn
Is the tweet-happy President Trump perhaps another Martha Mitchell, the wife of Nixon’s attorney general? Many would have forgotten her obsessive addiction to making telephone calls to the press during the Watergate crisis. Eventually (according to her), Nixon’s people sedated her to prevent her from using the telephone.
If there is a Pakistani leader who could be identified as a parallel of the Trump model (President Trump may not relish the analogy), it would be our president, later prime minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto: elected, popular, charismatic, media savvy, contemptuous of all authority other than his own, and a leader determined not just to disturb but to repudiate the status quo.
Within months of taking over in 1972, president Bhutto had nationalised industry, diluted the bureaucracy with lateral entrants, ravaged his opponents, and created a fiefdom that had no separate smoking area for dissident voices.