Blood is in the water

The following is an excerpt from a column by Daniel Henninger in the Wall Street Journal:

A president’s blood is in the water and another White House staff can only look out the windows as the sharks arrive from miles off.

We are far from Watergate levels of threat to the Trump presidency. The Democrats are in the congressional minority, and however much they intone the I-word, there will be no Sam Ervin committee.

Impeachment, though, is not the goal of Donald Trump’s opponents. They want to cut off his power — his hold on much of the American public. To do that, they need to make him look like a loser. They may succeed unless Team Trump can reverse the tides starting to erode the foundations of the president’s political support. . . .

What happened to Richard Nixon an eon ago looks familiar: Donald Trump’s presidency is getting bitten to death by an invisible, lethal ant hill of anonymous leakers.

For the first two weeks, Team Trump was winning. The executive orders unwinding the Obama regulatory apparatus had Democrats gagging in astonishment. Having abandoned any arguments based on policy, the Democrats sank to the level of senior members like Sen. Elizabeth Warren exchanging views on TV with comedians . . .

Then the White House overplayed its strong hand with the rushed-out immigration order. The political fires lit by that then consumed a vulnerable Mike Flynn and are now roaring toward the Oval Office. Unfair? Criminal? Maybe, and maybe the historians will sort it out someday as solace.

Forgotten now is that Nixon didn’t resign because of anything proven by the anonymous torrent, but only after he saw he’d lost the support of his own party in Congress. We’re not there . . . yet.

Mr. Trump is in the White House because voters wanted two things, in this order: 1) change; 2) Donald Trump.

That’s the basics. Get it straight, or 1974 could return.