Nixon’s tricks, and Trump’s
Let’s note for the record the sheer historical ignorance behind President Trump’s reckless, unfounded accusations on Twitter that ex-President Barack Obama “had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower just before the victory,” and that “This is Nixon/Watergate.”
Like many Americans of a certain age, I remember Watergate vividly. After Republican operatives were arrested on June 17, 1972, for burglarizing the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate Hotel, teachers at my school instructed all of us fifth-graders to subscribe to The New York Times and keep a running list of everyone involved in the scandal.
As our lists got longer, it became clear that a crew of unsavory gangsters had conducted illegal operations on behalf of President Nixon’s reelection campaign; the main question was whether Nixon himself knew about or authorized the criminal activity. By the time Nixon resigned in disgrace in August 1974, evidence of his guilt was obvious even to an 11-year-old.
The scandal’s timeline is important. The key reason Nixon’s top aides resorted to thuggery and dirty tricks — including the White House special counsel, Chuck Colson, and John Mitchell, the only U.S. attorney general ever sent to prison — was to help the President get reelected in 1972.
Victory was by no means assured. Upon taking office in 1969, Nixon inherited an unpopular, unwinnable war in Vietnam; a civil rights movement making increasingly militant demands for equality; and a restless, hostile countercultural movement of young people, Chicanos, women and gays.
Democrats controlled both houses of Congress, and in the 1970 midterm elections increased their majority in the House of Representatives by 12 seats while picking up 10 governorships. As late as April 1972, Sen. Ed Muskie, a Democrat, was leading Nixon in the polls by 47% to 39%.
That’s the biggest difference between the actual Watergate scandal and Trump’s imaginary modern analogue. In 1971-72, Nixon was battling for his political life against long odds, inspiring desperate criminal actions by his staff.
And what a string of dirty tricks it was! A Washington Post dispatch from October 1972 detailed Nixon campaign tactics found by federal investigators: “Following members of Democratic candidates’ families and assembling dossiers on their personal lives; forging letters and distributing them under the candidates’ letterheads; leaking false and manufactured items to the press; throwing campaign schedules into disarray; seizing confidential campaign files; and investigating the lives of dozens of Democratic campaign workers.”
Things got so bad that in May 1972, after an armed maniac shot and paralyzed Gov. George Wallace of Alabama, a conservative rival of Nixon’s, Colson concocted a scheme — never completed — to break into the shooter’s apartment and plant left-wing pamphlets to smear the President’s opponents.
“Good, keep at that,” Nixon was later heard saying on tape.
Compare that sewer of political insanity to 2016, when Obama, completing his final term, enjoyed the highest approval ratings of any national figure and most political insiders at the time — including the leadership of the Trump campaign — assumed Clinton was going to win.
For Trump’s accusation to hold water requires believing that Obama, mere weeks from the end of his presidency, was foolish enough to brazenly risk his reputation and even his freedom by ordering illegal surveillance to ensure Hillary Clinton would win the White House.
If you believe that, I’ll sell you the Watergate Hotel.
A more likely scenario is that Trump has, once again, concocted an outrageous fiction. It’s an updated version of his birther lies, when Trump claimed to have dispatched investigators who “discovered” Obama wasn’t born in America — a falsehood the President has never renounced.
More to the point, Trump has claimed — again, falsely — that intelligence agencies have no idea who attempted to tamper with the November election, although 17 U.S. agencies agree the Russians meddled.
By demanding a congressional investigation touching upon the actions of his own staff in the closing weeks of the campaign, Trump may, ironically, be reenacting a key prelude of Watergate. It was the ever-distrustful Nixon’s decision to secretly wiretap his own phones and offices that later supplied crucial evidence to investigators and doomed his hopes of surviving the scandal.
Trump’s unfounded claim of surveillance by Obama could result in a serious, thorough government investigation of his many debts and financial ties to Russian bankers, oligarchs and political figures — far deeper scrutiny than the President has faced up to now.
Watergate, indeed.