This Friday marks the 50th anniversary of the arrest of five men who were caught stealing documents from the Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate Hotel in the US capital.
(Enter the special: Watergate: 50 years since the scandal that brought down a president)
A scandal that ended up costing President Richard Nixon his head when it became cleartwo years later, that the Republican had tried to torpedo the candidacy of his rivals and then use state resources to derail the investigation.
(You are interested in: Trump, Nixon and the most famous presidents of the United States in cinema)
Paradoxically, the anniversary coincides with the hearings that the United States Congress has been holding to announce the results of a investigation into the maneuvers used by Donald Trump in an attempt to prevent Joe Biden, his opponent in the 2020 electionsassumed power and that ended in the violent assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, when a mob of his supporters tried to forcibly block the certification of the results.
While it is obvious that the Democrats used their power in the legislature to make the two moments coincide, it is also obvious that there are great similarities between them. The first, and most obvious, is that these are two unique moments in the country’s history that left a deep mark.
The second is that it involves two presidents, both from the same party, convinced that their power was unlimited and willing to do anything, even illegality, in order to cling to the Oval Office.
At least that’s what leading historians like Garrett Graff think, who has just written a new book on the subject (Watergate, the new story) and journalists like Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, the two Washington Post reporters, who initially revealed Nixon’s fabric, and that they have just published a new preface to All the President’s Men, the text in which they summarized their findings and which eventually became a film.
“President George Washington in his famous farewell address in 1796 had warned that democracy was fragile. Ingenious, ambitious, and unprincipled men will try to break the power of the people to steal the reins of government for themselves, he warned at the time.
Two of his successors – Nixon and Trump – showed how right our first president was. As reporters, who have spent half a century studying Nixon, we were convinced that the United States would never again have a president willing to trample on the national interestly weaken democracy for their personal and political gain. Until Trump came,” say Bernstein and Woodward.
For the first time in the country’s history, he sought to prevent the peaceful transfer of power to his successor. Trump, in that, surpassed even Nixon’s imagination.
Although both moments were serious, for journalists Trump’s was even worse. “This former president -they maintain-, not only tried to destroy the electoral system through unfounded claims of fraud and unprecedented intimidation against public officials.”
For Graff, although the parallel is more than evident and his sins are cut from the same cloth, the outcome ended up being completely different.
While Nixon was ultimately abandoned by his own party and became the first US president to resign from office, Trump survived two impeachment trials and continues to reign supreme among Republicans.
In fact, denying Biden’s victory has become a kind of requirement for anyone who aspires to public office on behalf of this community and it is almost a fact that Trump will be the Republican candidate for the 2024 presidential election and could well return on the shoulders of the White House.
This sharp contrast has several explanations. And they are not associated, according to experts, with the details of both cases but, rather, with the political and social realities of 50 years ago versus those that exist now.
Nixon’s moves to interfere in the electoral process at the time began long before the Watergate incident. Using a covert budget of more than 250,000 dollars, his campaign – ahead of the 1972 elections – advanced an entire operation to discredit Senator Edmund Muskie, the candidate preferred by the Democrats and who had a good chance of defeating him.
An operation that included the theft of documents and the proliferation of false news that ended his career and gave rise to George McGovern, another senator from South Dakota with left leanings and much weaker than Muskie, whom he crushed in the elections.
But the public only found out about this through a long investigative process that spanned a period of two years. First, through the revelations of the Washington Post and other media about the espionage in the hotel and then with the investigations carried out by the Department of Justice, as well as the Senate and the House of Representatives.
Initially, Nixon denied everything and in the process had the support of both the base of his party and the Republicans in Congress., which despite being a minority in both chambers turned to defend it alleging that it was a plot by their rivals. But, as time passed, new, more compromising evidence emerged.
First, a direct link was established between the thieves and their campaign coffers, from which the funds to finance them had come. Later, several of his officials, under oath, revealed that Nixon planted a device in the Oval Office to record all conversations.
After a long legal battle, which reached the Supreme Court of Justice, the president was forced to deliver the content of one of those conversations in which it was clear that he was aware of the Watergate incident and that he moved chips to try to cover it up .
That recording, which is known as the smoking gun, ended up eroding the support of the Republicans and precipitated his resignation when the House was already moving forward with the impeachment process.
However, when the public finally heard the president order the cover-up out loud, his popularity was already on the floor even among a significant sector of the base that had been digesting his lies for months.
Richard Nixon
34th President of the USA
The gold standard of the $ ended
approached China
retired from vietnam
Supported Israel in the Yom Kippur War
Oil crisis
overthrew Salvador Allende
Only Resigning President (by Watergate)
In his retirement he wrote 9 books
retweet pic.twitter.com/dPWiwg3qJu
– Prometheus (@AntonioM646) June 16, 2022
That, according to Graff, occurred for two fundamental reasons. In the first place, and although there were also partisan divisions at the time, the public consumed the news through a few media outlets that were seen as independent, both on television and in the press.
Although conservative media such as Fox had already existed since that time, they were not hyper-partisan and a high value was placed on the investigations carried out by agencies such as the FBI and the CIA.
The second is that Nixon was a politician who had emerged from the bowels of the Republican party and therefore needed their support to survive. So when Senator Barry Goldwater, who was considered the “conscience of the Republican Party,” finally turned his back on him in the late summer of 1974, his fate was cast.
The parallel with Trump
In the case of Donald Trump, the dynamic was very different. Unlike Nixon, his scandals did not grow gradually but almost in real timewhich generated a different impact among the public despite the seriousness of their actions.
In his first impeachment process, Trump was accused of asking a foreign government, that of Ukraine, to announce a criminal investigation against Joe Biden to stop his nomination as a candidate for the Democratic Party and of using the power of the White House so that this country will accept their claims.
In the second, he faced an accusation for having designed a whole strategy to prevent the rise of Biden, despite the fact that he defeated him with more than 8 million votes and 74 in the electoral college.
That added to the fact that it included pressure on the Department of Justice to report the non-existent fraud – denied by more than 50 courts in the country – as well as pressure on officials and congressmen not to certify the result.
The outcome was the capture of the Capitol, promoted by Trump, on the day that Congress was to issue said certification in a step considered as a procedure.
Despite this, he survived the two impeachment processes without major shocks thanks to a radically different context from that of Nixon. On the one hand, Trump counted on the proliferation of social networks and the discrediting of traditional media, which he himself promoted.
On the other, his support among the party remained strong. This, moreover, in a climate of extreme polarization where mistrust reigns between the parties and the credibility of the institutions has been eroded.
In fact, many today remain convinced that they actually stole the election from Trump, despite the fact that there is no evidence at all, and that therefore the attacks on the electoral system were legitimate.
It should be remembered that Trump, unlike Nixon, did not come to the White House because of the support of the establishment but as an outsider. And therefore, his fate has never been in the hands of the politicians but of the base, which has never abandoned him.
In fact, quite the opposite happened, because those Republicans who have dared to criticize him are the ones who have ended up as pariahs.
Graff, Bernstein and Woodward have no doubt that 50 years ago Trump would have been impeached in the blink of an eye. But they are also clear that Nixon would survive a trial against him in the present where the facts and evidence no longer weigh as before.
A conclusion, says the historian, “very worrying”, as it reveals the deterioration of American democracy and the dangers it will face in the near future.
SERGIO GOMEZ MASERI
Correspondent of THE TIME
Washington
On twitter: @sergom68
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