The Atlantic columnist Tom Nichols claimed former President Donald Trump would be “George Washington’s worst nightmare” as the 2024 GOP nominee wishes to be an “autocrat.”

During a Thursday PBS News interview with anchor Hari Sreenivasan, Nichols explained the title of his most recent cover story for The Atlantic. In the piece, Nichols categorized Trump as the subject of what would have been Washington’s largest source of anxiety.

Nichols claimed Trump is seeking to subvert the Constitution and stain the presidency.

The columnist also told Sreenivasan that Trump does not care about following in the footsteps of the country’s first president and only cares about “how much power and security” the presidency can bring him.

SREENIVASAN: Your most recent column, the cover story for The Atlantic, is titled Washington’s Nightmare. Donald Trump is the tyrant the first president feared. Why this article? Why now? Why is it important to take us back in history?

NICHOLS: Well, the answer to why now is because we are in a hotly contested, essentially tied election where Donald Trump is trying to return to office with a very clear agenda to become an autocrat, to subvert the Constitution, to undermine American freedoms, to stain the presidency even worse than he did the first time around. And I think we thought it was important when you’re putting this piece together. To remind people that all presidents, even the worst presidents before Trump, still have this kind of benchmark of George Washington, a man of integrity, not a saint, a man with a lot of personal flaws, but nonetheless someone who set the standard for presidential behavior. And even when they violated that kind of behavior, I think other presidents at least tried to pay lip service to it or understood that they were walking in Washington’s footsteps. Trump seems both unaware of that and really doesn’t care about anything related to the office other than how much power and security it can bring to him. And so I thought it was time to say that and to remind people that we don’t we don’t have to be this way. We do have a better heritage and a better history to draw on.

Watch the clip above via PBS.

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