Compare Richard Nixon and Macbeth as tragic heroes who created their own downfall. Please offer a thesis, 3 main points, and back up your claims with quotes from the text.

Just as Nixon’s presidency was plagued with stressful events and portents leading up to the infamous Watergate Scandal of 1972, so too in Shakespere’s tragedy do we find Macbeth suffering from similar pangs of self-doubt. If there is one personality trait that these two characters shared that shaped the way they approached their individual terms of power, it would probably be paranoia. Both Nixon and Macbeth feared the backlash they were to face by their constituents if word of their failures, in Nixon’s case, or treason, in Macbeth’s, were to be discovered.
For example, prior to 1972, Nixon faced mounting problems internationally in Cambodia and Vietnam. Anti-war demonstrations were becoming endemic, and protests against mounting American fatalities there had thrown the country into civil unrest. Unfortunately, in 1970, Cambodian military leaders staged a coup, forcing the North Vietnamese regime and American military to invade Phnom Penh. The action was widely unpopular, and Nixon thought he was surrounded by enemies. He was quoted saying things like: “We can have peace. We can have prosperity. We can have all the blacks screwing the whites,” and “The press is the enemy.”
Macbeth was concerned that the truth about his murder of King Duncan might come out into the open. For example, in act 3, scene 1, Banquo, a general of the Scottish army, suspects Macbeth’s complicity in the murder. When he leaves Macbeth’s presence at a banquet and does not promise to return quickly, Macbeth resolves to have two murderers kill him. He says,

To be thus is nothing (meaning, ‘To have achieved the throne is no great thing’),But to be safely thus. Our fears in BanquoStick deep, and in his royalty of natureReigns that which would be feared.

Thus, paranoia and fear tainted the rule of both Nixon and Macbeth. To include a second example of the detrimental effects of paranoia on the presidency/kingship, you might consider Nixon’s alcoholism, insomnia, and reliance on prescription sleeping pills. For Macbeth, you might consider how his paranoia drove him to seek out the witches (who initially prophesied that he would become king) in their cavern in order to convince himself that his reign was not in danger. In the links below, I have provided a newspaper article that details further some of Nixon’s shortcomings.
Finally, the nadir of both the Nixon presidency and Macbeth’s kingship can be considered their fall from power: the culmination of the “tragic” aspect of their respective downfalls. The Watergate Scandal refers to the corrupt tactics Nixon used in order to discredit his political opponents—bugging their personal homes, harassing activists, and hiring five men to break into the Democratic party headquarters in 1972 in order to leak information to the president concerning his opponents’ strategies. These underhanded tactics, once exposed, resulted in the complete loss of both his political backing and public support, ultimately forcing him to resign from office in 1974.
These events parallel the ousting of King Macbeth by the Scottish nobleman MacDuff. The witches had told Macbeth that he should be wary of MacDuff, as MacDuff was unsupportive of the king’s reign. Upon MacDuff’s flight to England, Macbeth ordered that his castle be seized and his wife and children murdered. Enraged upon learning this news, MacDuff swore revenge on Macbeth, which he finally executed during the final battle between Macbeth’s Scottish and MacDuff’s English forces. However, unlike Nixon, Macbeth did not yield when MacDuff offered to imprison him and turn him into a spectacle. Macbeth’s response to MacDuff’s offer, which comes in the final act, scene VIII, is

I will not yield,To kiss the ground before young Malcolm’s feetAnd to be baited with the rabble’s curse.

Thus, this discrepancy between the ways in which Nixon and Macbeth chose to be held accountable for their crimes—Nixon voluntarily stepping down from office and Macbeth refusing to submit and being slain because of it—might help you craft an effective thesis statement of your own. One that comes to mind for me is “Corruption, whether one owns up to it or tries to flee its consequences, inevitably destroys the corrupt.”