Trump’s scandals: Watergate on steroids

Until Donald Trump became president in 2017, former president Richard Nixon—the only president in U.S. history to resign from office—was widely regarded as setting the high-water mark for abusing the power of the U.S. presidency. Nixon was known as “Tricky Dick” for a reason. Ruled by his own paranoia, he ruthlessly plotted to destroy each of his perceived enemies—using both legal and illegal means at his disposal.

Nixon apparently couldn’t tell the difference though. Even after his central role in the Watergate coverup was exposed, leading to his resignation, he famously told interviewer David Frost in 1977, “When the president does it, that means it is not illegal.”

Four decades later, Trump took this statement and ran with it.

The Watergate break-in and coverup

The Watergate scandal unfolded shortly after the publication of what became known as the Pentagon Papers in 1971, which reverberated across U.S. society. The documents revealed that every U.S. president from Harry Truman to Lyndon Johnson had systematically lied to the public about the Vietnam War—down playing the level of U.S. involvement and exaggerating the extent of its success at every juncture. Although Nixon became president after the events documented in the Pentagon Papers, he was afraid that his own lies—including his secret bombing of Cambodia—would be exposed.

Although Daniel Ellsberg, the whistleblower who leaked the Pentagon Papers to the press, was already on trial facing a possible 115-year sentence, the White House took matters into their own hands. Nixon’s goal was to “try him in the press” by ruining his reputation. National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger call Ellsberg “the most dangerous man in America.” The White House sent its team of “Plumbers” (nicknamedthat because their goal was to stop “leaks”) to break into the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist to steal damaging information. They found nothing, but when the presiding judge found out about the break-in, he dismissed all charges against Ellsberg.

However, Nixon’s desperation to win a second term as president led him to repeat the same mistake, just at a more serious level. Just nine months after the “Plumbers'” first break-in backfired, the Committee to Re-elect the President organized two break-ins at Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate office complex in Washington, D.C. The burglars entered the Watergate offices in May and then again in June 1972 to steal confidential files and set up a wiretapping surveillance system. Unfortunately for Nixon, the burglars were caught by a security guard and arrested during their second foray into Democratic Party headquarters.

Nixon then engaged in an illegal coverup of the Committee’s criminal activities. Soon after the burglars’ arrest, he arranged hundreds of thousands of dollars in “hush money” to maintain their silence. Ironically, Nixon did not need any help in winning the 1972 election. He was reelected in a landslide.

Although Nixon denied any involvement in the Watergate burglary, suspicions began to mount about his administration’s role in covering up its role in the break-in. A handful of his top aides, significantly including White House Counsel John Dean, testified before a grand jury—knowing that Nixon planned to scapegoat them for the burglaries and coverup. Among other things, they revealed that Nixon had secretly recorded conversations that would prove his role in the illegal activities.

After refusing to turn over the recordings for months, Nixon was forced to relent, and the (heavily edited) incriminating tapes became public. Despite his infamous claim, “I am not a crook!” he was forced to resign from office on August 8, 1974, to avoid impeachment and an almost certain conviction.

U.S. politics shifts rightward post-Watergate

Nixon’s successor, former vice president Gerald Ford, quickly pardoned him. And partly for that reason, the Republican Party faced a hostile electorate, and Ford lost the presidential election to centrist Democrat Jimmy Carter in 1976.

But popular disgust was directed at both major political parties, and both sought to reinvent themselves in the years that followed. The effects are still being felt decades later. Dan Balz recently argued in the Washington Post,”As William Galston of the Brookings Institution put it, ‘We have been living for nearly half a century in the world that Watergate made.’”

Balz described the Republicans’ transformation as follows:

A Republican Party personified by politicians like Ford, Nelson Rockefeller and George Romney was taken over by a new, Southern and Sun Belt-based conservative movement that viewed government with considerably more hostility. In 1964, this brand of conservatism, led by Sen. Barry Goldwater of Arizona, went down in defeat to Johnson. By 1980, with the election of Ronald Reagan, the era of New Deal liberalism had been blunted by a conservatism that would hold sway in the party and the country for decades.

Reagan’s electoral victory symbolized a new shift rightward that was already underway in U.S. politics. The Democrats, for their part, soon began a process of tailing the Republicans’ rightward shift, justified by its pursuit of so called “swing voters”—white suburban voters torn between voting Democrat or Republican. Since that time, the Republicans have set the agenda in U.S. electoral politics, with the Democrats offering a somewhat less Draconian version of the same agenda—the lesser of two evils, but still quite evil.

Balz described the Democratic Party’s makeover, closely following the Republicans’:

Meanwhile, the Democrats were to undergo their own transformation, thanks in part to the infusion of new members of Congress beginning with the 1974 election. “They tended to be more educated, more professional than previous tranches of Democrats, less connected to the working class, more interested in issues that weren’t within the four corners of meat and potatoes,” Galston said.

Future president Bill Clinton helped to form a new faction called the Democratic Leadership Council, formed in 1985 to break the Democratic Party from its so-called “special interests”—organized labor, civil rights groups, and other liberal social movements. This wing of the Democrats became dominant by the 1990s, calling itself the “New Democrats,”personified by Clinton’s election in 1992 and reelection in 1996.

After campaigning in 1992 with the slogan “Putting People First,” Clinton perfected the art of what became known as “triangulation“, in which he managed to steal the Republicans’ thunder by adopting and passing many of their proposals into law. These included “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (a policy that prevented openly gay soldiers from serving in the military); the Defense of Marriage Act (banning same sex marriage at the national level); and ending “welfare as we know it” through the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (which made government benefits for the poor temporary—imposing a lifetime limit for families—and created work requirements without offering federally subsidized childcare).

The road to Trump

The Watergate scandal, coupled with the release of the Pentagon Papers and the subsequent defeat of U.S. imperialism in Vietnam, caused public trust in U.S. government institutions to plummet—and it has never recovered. Whereas in 1964, according to Pew Research, 77 percent of those surveyed said they trusted the government to do the right thing “just about always” or “most of the time,” that figure declined to 36 percent by the end of 1974, after Nixon resigned.

That downward trajectory in public trust—with some brief fluctuations, as after the 9-11 attacks—has continued until today. Since 2007, the percentage of respondents saying they trust the government to do the right thing “always” or “most of the time” has not reached more than 30 percent. And this year, only about 20 percent agreed—reaching a historic low.

By the time Trump announced his candidacy for president in 2015, the Republican Party had remade itself over the previous decades, loudly embracing a host of reactionary causes. The Republicans went through several evolutions during those decades: the Christian Right and Moral Majority in the 1980s and 1990s (opposing abortion and LGBTQ rights, while championing the fight against affirmative action as so-called “reverse racism;” and then the “Tea Party” movement in the 2000s, which combined the demands of the religious right with calls for lower taxes [for the rich] and cuts in government social spending—along with a large dose of open racism.

In this way, the pump had already been primed for Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party, although it lurched yet further right once he entered the fray.

Perhaps for this reason, Nixon’s crimes might seem to pale in comparison to Trump’s. If Nixon cornered the market on clandestine activities, Trump was audacious in flouting the rules of presidential conduct—seeming to dare the political establishment to come after him.His policies were impulsive—and often reversed on a dime—while seeming to be primarily driven by his enormously bloated ego rather than a coherent world view.

He did a lot of damage as president, however: from imposing a “Muslim Ban,” to banning trans soldiers from the military,and appointing three utterly reactionary Supreme Court justices who helped to form the 6-3 conservative majority that has overturned the federal right to abortion.This is not to mention Trump’s Covid-19 denial, in which he consistently downplayed the enormous dangers of the virus and promoted ludicrous solutions, such as injecting household disinfectants into human bodies—while doing little to coordinate a national response to the pandemic.

And these are just a few of the highlights. Nevertheless, Trump made it through his first term legally unscathed, despite the Democrats’ two attempts at impeachment.

But now that Trump is no longer president, he is up to his eyeballs in investigations. And his unhinged behavior after losing the 2020 election might finally do him in.

Trump’s election denial

To this day, Trump has refused to accept that he lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden. As recently as July 9th, Trump insisted that a new ruling by the Wisconsin Supreme Court barring many ballot boxes in the state was retroactive to the 2020 election—vindicating his election fraud claims. It does not: the ruling only applies to future elections.

But Trump has never let the truth get in the way of his delusional claims. Well before the 2020 election took place, Trump began claiming that he could only lose if it was rigged against him—setting the stage for his claims of massive voter fraud after he did lose.

Trump’s own attorney general, William Barr, stated plainly after the election, “If there was evidence of fraud, I had no motive to suppress it… But my suspicion all the way along was that there was nothing there. It was all bullshit.”

Trump and his allies filed more than 50 lawsuits claiming voting fraud, mostly in battleground states where he won against Hillary Clinton in 2016 but lost to Biden in 2020:Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. All were dismissed by state and federal judges, some of them Trump appointees. Even the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear two lawsuits seeking to overturn the 2020 election resultson behalf of Trump, from Pennsylvania and Texas. Likewise, ballot recounts in Georgia and Pennsylvania merely validated Biden’s victory.

Trump’s downfall?

But Trump brazenly crossed the line between legal and illegal activities in two incidents:

In January 2021, Trump called Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffenspergerand pressured him to “find” almost 12,000 votes to make him the winner over Biden in Georgia’s 2020 election results.

As the New York Times reported, this puts”him at risk of being indicted on charges of violating relatively straightforward Georgia criminal statutes, including criminal solicitation to commit election fraud.” The Times added,Fulton County prosecutor, Fani T. Willis, “in court filings, has indicated that a number of other charges are possible, including racketeering and conspiracy, which could take in a broad roster of pro-Trump associates both inside and outside of Georgia.”

Trump “associates”—including Rudolph W. Giuliani and Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina—beware: If Trump goes down on this one, he is taking you with him.

The January 6th House Select Committee hearings, now taking place, are hearing witness testimony that Trump was actively involved in organizing the January 6, 2021, violent riot at the U.S. Capitol—including his dog whistle tweet in the early morning of December 19th. “Statistically impossible to have lost the 2020 Election,” Trump tweeted, adding, “Big protest in D.C. on January 6th,” referring to the day Congress was set to certify Joe Biden’s electoral college victory.”Be there, will be wild!”

On June 28th, the testimony of former Trump aide Cassidy Hutchinson, just 26 years old and a Republican herself, opened the floodgates for an insider’s view of Trump’s conduct before and during the January 6th riot at the Capitol.

As the New York Times reported,

For two stunning hours on live television, Ms. Hutchinson described an unhinged former president who, she said, was warned that his supporters were carrying weapons and expressed no concern because they were not a threat to him. She said that Mr. Trump tried to grab the steering wheel of the presidential limousine and lunged for his Secret Service agent because he wanted to go to the Capitol, and added that at one point he hurled his plate of lunch at a wall in the White House.

“I grabbed a towel and started wiping the ketchup off of the wall to help the valet out,” Ms. Hutchinson testified.

(Later in the day, Secret Service officials who requested anonymity said that the two men in the presidential limousine with Mr. Trump were prepared to state under oath that neither was assaulted by the former president and that he did not reach for the wheel.)

Alas, the Secret Service found itself in a difficult spot, after it claimed to have erased its texts from January 5th and 6th, but for changing reasons: first for a software upgrade, then because of device replacements. The Select Committee then issued a subpoena to the Secret Service to produce the deleted texts, which as of this writing have not materialized.

There is also evidence that Trump planned ahead of time to call on January 6th rallyers to march to the Capitol, showing that his rally speech was not a spontaneous call to action.

Echoes of Watergate—on steroids

As the hearings continue, more and more testimony and evidence has stacked up against Trump. And one of Trump’s closest former advisers, the rabid right-winger Steve Bannon (who appears to have been born with his middle finger in the air)—now finds himself not only agreeing to testify but also facing charges for contempt of Congress for repeatedly defying subpoenas to testify before the House Select Committee.

Yet Trump is digging himself in yet deeper. Apparently still unable to control his impulses, he seems to have called a White House staffer expected to testify in a future House Select Committee hearing. The staffer refused to take the call, and their lawyer informed the Committee.

While the January 6th hearings continue, there is no way to predict what revelations will come next.

But can you hear Nixon laughing in his grave?