As with Trump, GOP once stood by Nixon

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 28/10/2019 (2167 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

With each new revelation about U.S. President Donald Trump’s machinations in Ukraine, Senate Republicans squirm, though most remain silent or they join Trump in denouncing the Democrats’ impeachment hearings as another “witch hunt.” A lone voice of dissent has been Sen. Mitt Romney, who has denounced Trump for his brazen efforts to employ foreign governments to influence the 2020 U.S. elections.

A majority of Republican senators, however, continue to rationalize, dismiss or ignore Trump’s atrocious behaviour, actions and disregard for the U.S. Constitution — almost on a daily basis.

It seems there isn’t much Trump can say or do which will convince these senators to turn on him. Only an impulsive decision, such as betraying the Kurds in northern Syria, has inspired some criticism of the president.

The Republican senators’ utter devotion to a man they surely know to be immoral, inept and corrupt is based on extreme partisanship and a desire to preserve their own political careers, which they believe are linked to Trump and his (dwindling) base, and tremendous fear of the president’s explosive and unpredictable rage.

All of which means while the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives has the simple majority needed to impeach Trump, his subsequent conviction in a Republican-controlled Senate is highly unlikely. To force Trump from office before the next election, at least 20 Republicans would have to vote against him, together with the 45 Democrats and two independent senators. By any stretch, that’s a huge political obstacle to overcome.

But stranger things have happened, as they did 45 years ago. Then, Congressional and Senate Republicans turned against president Richard Nixon over the Watergate scandal, compelling him to resign in August 1974 to avoid being impeached and convicted. (In 1974, the Democrats had a majority in the House of Representatives as well as the Senate, but still would have needed the support of at least nine Republicans and two independent senators to meet the two-thirds requirement and convict Nixon.)

Still, the painful process dragged out for nearly 26 months, nearly tearing the country apart. Though it is true a delegation of Republicans famously met with Nixon and urged him to resign a few days before he did so, many Senate Republicans stuck by him until the bitter end. They defended his indefensible actions — lying and stonewalling — which is precisely what Senate Republicans are doing today for Trump.

For months following the break-in on June 17, 1972, by Republican party operatives at the Democratic party headquarters at the Watergate complex, an overwhelming majority of Republican politicians dismissed it as a “third-rate burglary,” as Nixon’s press secretary, Ron Ziegler, described it.

Certainly, none of them believed Nixon had any knowledge of the crime, a belief they would cling to for the entire period of the scandal debate and after.

By February 1973, after Nixon had been easily re-elected, stories in the Washington Post and other newspapers about “slush funds” and misuse of Republican party donations began upsetting Senate Republicans. They felt the allegations had to be fully investigated, and their frustration increased when it became clear Nixon and his White House staff were determined not to support an official inquiry.

In fact, we now know Nixon and his team were doing everything in their power to cover up the scandal and thwart the FBI from looking into it further.

Finally, in mid-April 1973, seeking to appease the members of his party, Nixon relented and ordered a Justice Department investigation of Watergate. He agreed he would also permit members of this staff to testify before a Senate committee. Those televised Senate committee hearings, with the riveting testimony of White House counsel John Dean, established Nixon’s culpability in the coverup. That, and the revelations that Nixon had thousands of hours of tape recordings of his private conversations, ultimately did him in.

Nearly a yearlong battle over the legal rights to the tapes ensued, until the courts compelled Nixon to hand them over. When he did so, it was discovered that 18½ minutes of a key discussion had been mysteriously erased; some Senate Republicans still refused to support impeachment and conviction.

The so-called “smoking gun” — the release of a tape in which Nixon and H.R. Haldeman, his chief adviser, were heard scheming to halt an FBI investigation into the Watergate burglary a week after it had happened — was the final straw. Within weeks, Nixon resigned, the first and only U.S. president to do so.

One key difference between then and now was that though Nixon was indeed as corrupt, paranoid and mean-spirited as history remembers him, he nevertheless possessed a certain dignity and intelligence that Trump does not and never will have. Nixon lied repeatedly about attempting to cover up the scandal and dirty tricks carried out by his orders, but most Americans, curiously, did not view Nixon as unhinged or unfit to be president.

No one, for instance, ever raised the idea of using the 25th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution to remove Nixon — as they have with Trump — because of his inability “to discharge the powers and duties of said office.”

Trump does have one tool Nixon did not in his fight against impeachment: Fox News and its partisan commentators, who frequently function as the propaganda arm of his White House. If Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post helped expose Nixon’s actions, don’t underestimate Fox’s power to keep Senate Republicans in line and rescue Trump from the ignominious downfall he, too, deserves.

Now & Then is a column in which historian Allan Levine puts the events of today in a historical context.