As the Watergate scandal unfolded, new editions of the Washington Post newspaper were rushed over to the White House at night so Richard Nixon, the president, could brace for each devastating revelation.
Half a century later, Donald Trump does not seem to fear explosive front page headlines or shocking disclosures of malfeasance. Usually because he has written them himself.
The US president’s determination to break from his predecessors includes a willingness to shout from the rooftops of misconduct past presidents would have strained every sinew to conceal.
And the consequence, observers say, is that Trump’s brazen approach earns him perverse credit for authenticity and takes the sting out of scandals that used to be career-ending when uncovered by muckraking journalists.
“This is a dangerous notion that, just because a president chooses to be corrupt in public openly, it’s OK,” said Larry Saturdaydirector of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia. “People say, well, if it were really corrupt, it would be hidden. It’s a false assumption, but many people have it. It’s a new theory of scandal.”
Trump delivered one of his most blatant examples last weekend. In a social media post addressed directly to Pam Bondi, the attorney general, the president fumed over the lack of legal action against James Comey, the former FBI director, Adam Schiff, the California senator, and Letitia James, the New York attorney general.
“We can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility. They impeached me twice, and indicted me (5 times!), OVER NOTHING. JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW,” he wrote, before deleting the message and posting another supportive of Bondi.
It was a glaringly obvious effort to order the justice department to take action against his political opponents. On Thursday the agency followed through by charging Comey with false statements and obstruction over congressional testimony about the investigation into contacts between Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russia.
Democrats described it as “a disgraceful attack on the rule of law”, the latest in a series of moves that have threatened the justice department’s traditional independence. But Republicans, who five decades ago forced Nixon to resign over the Watergate burglary and ensuing cover-up, were mostly silent. There was no hint of impeaching Trump over what many saw as an impeachable offence.
Richard Paintera former chief White House ethics lawyer, said: “It’s what prosecutors do in dictatorships. They want to run up this Comey thing that has no merit to it. That’s what they do in Russia. You piss off Putin and end up in some gulag somewhere. That’s not, I thought, how we want to run our country.”
If Trump’s shamelessness is one superpower, his ability to flood the zone is another. He has spent the past decade proving the thesis that while one crisis can topple a politician, a hundred crises are subject to the law of diminishing returns. “It’s Watergate, Every Day,” read a headline on the Bulwark website this week.
In a 2005 conversation captured on an Access Hollywood tape released in 2016, he described his approach to women: “I just start kissing them … And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything … Grab ‘em by the pussy.”
He has urged foreign governments to investigate political opponents. During a 2016 campaign rally, Trump said, “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” referring to rival Hillary Clinton’s deleted emails. In 2019 he publicly called on China to target Joe Biden, saying: “China should start an investigation into the Bidens.”
In a 2017 NBC News interview, Trump openly stated that he fired Comey because of “this Russia thing”, referring to an investigation into Russian election interference. This admission was cited in special counsel Robert Mueller’s report as potential evidence of obstruction of justice, yet Trump framed it as a decisive action rather than wrongdoing.
Trump expressed no contrition over the deadly insurrection at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021 but rather persisted with his false claim of a stolen election, hailed the rioters as patriots and issued a blanket pardon of them on his first day back in office.
In May this year, the president said he will accept a $400m luxury plane from Qatar and use it as Air Force One, defending the arrangement as a “gesture of good faith” despite concerns that it could violate the US constitution’s emoluments clause. The Trump Organization, run by the president’s two oldest sons, struck a series of lucrative deals in the Middle East.
The breaches have come so thick and fast that they have become unremarkable to a numbed, desensitised audience. Sabato commented: “It becomes background noise. If there’s bad news about a particular person or category of public policy then it’s less significant because you expect it. What’s Trump done today? Then you shrug your shoulders and have your third cup of coffee.”
Kurt Bardellaa political commentator, agrees that “Trump being Trump” no longer has shock value, especially since he previewed many of his actions during the election campaign. “It’s normalised versus when someone acts completely out of character: ‘Whoa, where did that come from? I never would have expected that person to act this way.’”
The lightning-paced news cycle makes it easy for Trump to move on from the scandal du jour, Bardella adds. “Watergate was so powerful, [Monica] Lewinsky was so powerful because it was a singular focus for an extended period of time. Now we consider a long news cycle something that lasts actually an entire week, whereas before a week was a blip on the radar.”
Even so, Trump has faced a barrage of lawsuits, ethical complaints and demands for investigations. But Republicans control both chambers of Congress and have shown little appetite for imposing accountability. He has spent a decade purging critics from the party and reshaping it in his own image.
Wendy Schiller, a political science professor at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, said: “The institutional structures that should be countervailing, that should be pushing up against this and saying: ‘Oh, this is terrible, he’s breaking the law’, are completely absent. They’ve been co-opted or taken over by the Republican party or the conservative supreme court.
“There isn’t a counter voice to say to the American people this is not acceptable behaviour. I don’t think Trump gets credit for flooding the zone or that his strategy is particularly remarkable. It’s that he has neutered the Congress and bought off the supreme court. There isn’t anybody, literally, who can stop him.”
Trump’s boasting about conduct that others would hide also strikes a particular chord with his Make America great again (Maga) support base. In an October 2016 presidential debate, when Hillary Clinton accused him of avoiding taxes for years, Trump responded defiantly: “That makes me smart.”
In a subsequent episode of Saturday Night Live, the comedian Dave Chappelle argued that such moments humanised Trump: his blunt admission of gaming a rigged system made him relatable, not elitist. Chappelle said: “The reason he’s loved is because people in Ohio have never seen somebody like him. He’s what I call an honest liar.”
Years later, that still holds with the Maga faithful. John Zogbyan author and pollster, observed: “For voters who want to rage against the machine, instead of being elected president and head of the machine, he’s the guy who feels he’s been put in place to both enforce and live the rage against the machine.
“The very fact that he breaks all the rules so brazenly – takes foreign trips and makes personal business deals – adds to the appeal. He’s the baddest cowboy in town. He does and says what a lot of people wish that they could do and say and he gets away with it. With Donald Trump, the one piece of authenticity is he is exactly what he says he is.”
