Hey, give us a break! We aren't all as old as you, ya know!
I may be older than many here, but my memory remains good (if I remember correctly
).
Are the cases comparable though? I would imagine that public opinion turned against Nixon as the evidence was revealed during the investigation. With Trump, a mountain of evidence is already known, yet MAGA-world seems immune to it.
Yes, I think Watergate and Jan 6th are comparable enough. They aren't totally the same, but there's enough in both to make valid comparisons of them.
Watergate was about Nixon running a secret police group, the Plumbers, from within the White House. It was paid for by secret contributions from Nixon supporters. Congress didn't know about it, didn't pay for it, and had no oversight over it. These things made it without question unconstitutional.
Nixon tried and failed to claim immunity and executive privilege during the cover up. Nixon tried to hide the fact that he personally ordered the Watergate break-in as well as the subsequent cover up. He tried to stone-wall the investigations by refusing to release documents including the secret Oval Office tapes. Ultimately, the US Supreme Court ruled 8-0 that executive privilege did not apply and he had to release all documents including the tapes.
Before that Supreme Court ruling, Nixon had tried to persuade the public that he was innocent, by voluntarily releasing written transcripts of selected portions of the tapes, being sure to omit any conversations that he knew would incriminate him. That backfired. Those transcripts became infamous because they revealed how foul-mouthed and bigoted Nixon was in private. Yes, the general public was truly offended by that. Whenever Nixon cursed, the phrase
Expletive Deleted appeared in the transcripts. That appeared so many times, it quickly became a joke, at Nixon's expense. If you wanted to curse someone out, while appearing to remain civil, you only had to wink and say
Expletive Deleted. Everyone got the joke.
At around the same time, other investigations revealed how Nixon had avoided paying any federal income tax, by using a number of highly dubious deductions, for a number of years. Nixon's
Expletive Deleted and tax evasion began to turn public opinion against him.
Once the 'smoking gun' evidence on the tapes was revealed, most public support, as well as Congressional & Senate support vanished. After nearly 2 years, the public finally saw Nixon as the tax evading, foul-mouthed, lying president who ordered the criminal Watergate break-in and the criminal cover-up.
During Watergate, the GOP never had a majority in either the Senate or the House. The Democrats ran the Watergate investigations and the impeachment process. Once the Supreme Court made it's unanimous 8-0 ruling, and the Articles of Impeachment were passed by the House Judiciary Committee, and GOP support in both Houses rapidly collapsed.
After Watergate was over, hard-core Nixon supporters, including Roger Ailes (a young White House aide at the time), convinced themselves that it was bad PR that brought Nixon down. They blamed the three major news networks NBC, ABC, CBS, as well as the Washington Post and New York Times – all were politically opposed Nixon. Of course, they ignored Nixon's criminal acts in Watergate and the constitutional crisis he created. This false belief motivated the creation of Faux News, with Roger Ailes in charge.
Trump tried to overthrow the results of a legitimate election, in a wide-spread effort to toss aside election results in six states, substituting false electors, and to get the vice president to toss aside the certified election results from those six states. He also invoked a violent riot at the US Capital building to stop the election certification proceedings. It's not the same as Nixon's Plumbers, but both were unconstitutional as well as criminal – without question.
Like Nixon, Trump falsely claimed immunity and executive privilege in an effort to squelch investigations. These efforts have largely failed in the court system, but this ain't over yet.
Unlike Watergate, the elected GOP members of the House and Senate supported Trump. And, Faux News played a very large role in whipping up the MAGA crowd to support Trump. They persist in the myth that Trump is innocent and that his political opponents are behind all of this.
That's why I am treating Nixon and Trump similarly.
