Trump: Smells Even More Like Watergate

I can’t deny it. President Trump repels me. But that doesn’t mean I think he’s in imminent danger of impeachment. He may be innocent of wrongdoing. 

He may just be an idiot.

Still, with multiplying questions involving Trump himself, his campaign team, and son-in-law Jared Kushner, it might be time to look at a few lessons from the Watergate Era. By chance, I was going through my closet last week and pitching books I no longer needed. A dog-eared collection of Doonesbury cartoons by Gary Trudeau caught my attention. Leafing through his work, I was struck how many examples from the 70s resonate today in the happy Land of Trumpistan.

At first, the Watergate Affair didn’t seem to amount to much. On June 19, 1972, two days after the five original burglars of the Democratic National Committee offices were arrested, White House Press Secretary Ron Ziegler was already assuring reporters no one working for President Richard M. Nixon knew anything about it. 

“A third-rate burglary,” he labeled the incident.

Yet, inside the White House, a cover-up was already unfolding.

Forty-four summers later, we know there was serious Russian meddling during the 2016 election. President Trump refused to admit it. The story was “a hoax.” There was no Russian interference.

“Fake news,” he called it.

Real news, American intelligence agencies countered.

Like Nixon before him, Trump believed he could put the matter quickly behind him. Nixon was never able to get ahead of the story. Trump hasn’t been either. For Nixon the burglary marked the beginning of a debacle that included the incarceration of three dozen men who worked in the White House or for his re-election campaign. That included the burglars. G. Gordon Liddy, a lookout for the five—and a man who put forward a plan that included “mugging squads, kidnapping teams, prostitutes to compromise the opposition and electronic surveillance” and followed up with offers to kill journalists and maybe snuff out a witness—also spent time in the slammer. Later Liddy showed up frequently as a guest on Fox News.

Just saying.

Today, I would argue, there’s nothing yet to merit calls for impeachment; but you have to wonder. None of the logical possibilities reflect well on our current President. In fact, among options to choose from, you have to be thinking that Trump and his boys are (choose as many as you like):

a. Incompetents

b. Liars

c. Money grubbers

d. Criminals

e. Traitors

Regardless of your answer, Trump and Company would be well-served to delve into Watergate history. It might give them a few ideas of what not to do—whereas, so far, they seem adept at doing exactly what they shouldn’t.

You don’t want to end up, for starters, with a Press Secretary who is mocked in almost every corner. (Well, not on Fox News, true.) Sean Spicer is the Trump version of Ron Ziegler (see below). 

Ron Ziegler and Sean Spicer are similar.

In the same way, when Trump addressed a crowd at the graduation ceremony of the Coast Guard Academy recently, he channeled his inner “Tricky Dick,” as Nixon was often referred to. “Look at the way I’ve been treated lately, especially by the media,” Trump moaned. “No politician in history, and I say this with great surety, has been treated worse or more unfairly.”

Nixon would have commiserated. In the cartoon which follows, Trudeau is actually quoting Nixon:

Nixon, like Trump, hated the way the press kept digging for the truth.

Month after month, following the break-in, a dark cloud of suspicion grew over the Nixon White House. People inside government agencies, including the famed “Deep Throat” (top FBI official Mark Felt) kept “leaking,” or supplying leads to reporters. Press Secretary Ziegler complained repeatedly in the spring of 1973, saying there had been a plague of “irresponsible leaks of tidal wave proportion.”

But leaks, by their nature, don’t mean leakers aren’t chasing the truth. More often than not, they were pointing a path to the truth. The leaks weren’t the story then—and they aren’t the story today. And the “fake news” wasn’t fake then either. It was nothing more, nor less, than good investigative journalism. It was the First Amendment, working as the Founding Fathers intended.

Then, as now, the White House fought back until facts overwhelmed all defenses. On April 17, 1973, in the face of a cascade of fresh evidence, Ziegler was forced to tell reporters that all previous White House statements on Watergate were “inoperative.” 

Mike Pence could relate. Remember when he said James Comey wasn’t fired because of the Russian probe?

Mark it: “Inoperative.”

Nor is poor Trump the only President to complain about the free press, including the “failing New York Times,” as he called it and the Washington Post. In the summer of 1973, the White House issued a statement, accusing those same two papers of taking part in a “careful, coordinated strategy…to prosecute a case against the President in the press, using innuendo, distortion of fact, and outright falsehood.”

The more the noose tightened, the more Nixon and Company flailed. There were calls to acting F.B.I. Director L. Patrick Gray, demanding he call off the Watergate investigation. Gray went so far as to destroy incriminating evidence and foundations for a case of obstruction of justice were laid. Today, we know former F.B.I. Director James Comey is prepared to testify that he too was asked to end an investigation. This may still not indicate we have a second Watergate; but a logical person must wonder.

When Nixon was in office it took months before the first heads rolled. John Mitchell, who ran his re-election campaign, ended up in court and eventually joined half the Nixon Administration in prison. For Trump, General Flynn may represent the first canary in the court room. In Nixon’s day, the dam broke when John Dean, his White House Counsel, ran into legal trouble.

Today, the key may be Jared Kushner.  

Indeed, President Trump reacts just as badly, with similar paranoia, as Mr. Nixon, harming his defense, even if innocent. He refers to the press and media outlets he doesn’t like as “enemies of the people.” Nixon’s Vice President, Spiro Agnew, attacked the press and the nation’s elites as “nattering nabobs of negativism.” Real Americans wouldn’t be fooled by their biased reporting. A nation, Nixon insisted, should not “be remembered only for the petty, little, indecent things that seem to obsess us…Let others spend their time dealing with the murky, small, unimportant, vicious little things. We…will spend our time building a better world.”

Trump? He’s going to build a big, beautiful Wall.

In the face of an unending stream of revelations, Nixon had increasing trouble sleeping. He began drinking heavily. By fall of 1973 he admitted he was worn down by “innuendo, by leak, by, frankly, leers and sneers of commentators.”

Trump might soon say the same.

If you’re a Trump supporter or a member of his Administration, you might want to recall that a trail of shady financial transactions helped blow the top off the Watergate cover-up. In 1973 a series of checks and Mexican money laundering helped tie Liddy and the five burglars to the Nixon campaign team and a cover-up rooted in the Oval Office. 

Four decades later, questions involving money may help us get to the bottom of the story of Trump and the Russians. You start with General Flynn and clear ties to Russian rubles. You move on to Paul Manafort, former Trump campaign manager, and pro-Russian ties and links to crooked banks and shell companies in Cyprus. Next, you consider Carter Page, who advised the campaign briefly, and reports of an alleged secret deal with Gazprom, a Russian energy company with direct ties to Vladimir Putin. That deal was worth $10.2 billion euros, an “art of the deal” move that might interest even a newly-minted U.S. President. Finally, we have to ask why Jared Kushner can’t seem to remember talking to, making eye contact or even seeing a Russian from a distance. Yet we know he met with a representative of a Russian bank under U.S. sanction.

Somehow, he forgot that.

Even more unsettling, if you’re a Trump fan, Watergate investigations kept spreading like kudzu. An examination of President Nixon’s taxes—are you listening, Mr. Trump, because you should be—resulted in an order to pay $432,787.13 in back taxes, plus interest.

(As a bonus: Vice President Agnew was ousted from office in a bribery and tax evasion scheme.)

In the end, Nixon might have survived had the existence of a secret taping system not been revealed. Once Congress and the federal courts started demanding the recordings, Nixon and his top aides were finished.

Tapes? President Trump, do you have tapes? You hinted you did. And we would all love to hear them!

Once people heard the tapes, Nixon and his men were finished.

In one famous taped moment, Nixon discussed how White House staffers should testify before Congress or in court. “Stonewall it,” he said. Don’t give any information if you can help it. It reminds you a little of President Trump calling General Flynn in April and telling him to “stay strong,” which might sound to the unbiased more than a little like an attempt to suborn a witness.

In yet another tape from an April long ago, Nixon admitted to his Attorney General that many of his aides had serious legal problems. “The obstruction of justice is what’s bad,” the President told him, while feigning his own innocence.

The Attorney General added, “And the perjury—the suborning of witnesses, the perjury and perjuring yourself.”

Finally, he reminded Nixon: “[A]s the President of the United States, your job is to enforce the law.”

Trump would do well to remember.