The Watergate legacy
Fifty-one years ago yesterday (as I write this), five inadequate, filthy little men broke into the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate Hotel in Washington DC. They were there at the direction and superintendence of two other inadequate, filthy little men called E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy.
Thus began the greatest American political scandal of the twentieth century. It was a scandal that ended with the imprisonment of several of its participants and masterminds and the resignation and subsequent pardon of the president of the United States, Richard M. Nixon.
No lessons were learned from what came to be known as the Watergate Scandal, except perhaps the perception that a sitting president is immune from justice. That is Watergate’s single ignominious legacy of that stupid and inevitable screw up: that a sitting president cannot be criminally charged. That bit of stupidity came from a memo (not a law), drafted by someone at the Department of Justice. Such are the flimsy pretexts upon which stupid people act. Such is the pretext upon which Donald Trump believes he can escape justice if he is re-elected president.
Today, also thanks in part to Watergate, the Republican claim that justice is being unevenly and unfairly applied to Donald Trump is not far off the mark. What they mean, of course, is the pathetic and easily refuted notion that Trump is a victim of a political witch hunt. No, that charge belongs to Republicans, the quintessential witch hunters.
After all, it’s Republicans who have spent much of their recent existence abusing power whenever they’ve possessed it. Their abuse ranges from the impeachment of Bill Clinton to the serial pursuit of his wife through multiple Benghazi investigations, to the present day House Judiciary Committee pursuit of what its shouty and half-dressed chairman insists on mislabelling “The Biden Crime Family.”
The Republican charge that the system is “rigged” against Donald Trump is laughable on its face. After all, what kind of system rigged against him would permit Trump to steal documents containing vital state secrets and squirrel them away at Mar-a-Lago for months on end? What kind of rigged system would permit him to remain a free man, with his passport unseized and his right of movement and free speech uninfringed? What kind of rigged system would appoint Aileen Cannon as Trump’s judge? I’ll tell you what kind. A system that is rigged in his favour, if anything. A system we can, in part, thank the Watergate legacy for.
Had Nixon gone to prison, as he most emphatically should have done, perhaps Trump would have never happened in the first place. After all, the spectre that America really does toss its former presidents into the hoosegow might have given even Trump pause. More to the point, with Nixon in prison the Republican Party might well have been severely crippled, possibly even permanently so. As it stood, Republicans reclaimed power a scant six years after Nixon resigned, and held it for another twelve.
The Watergate legacy, that justice is not equal, persists to the present day. Presidents get special treatment. They enjoy privileges the rest of us do not. If Trump goes to prison, and I believe he will, he will undoubtedly serve a term of imprisonment much lighter than anyone else would have received in his identical circumstances. His imprisonment will be far more comfortable than Reality Winner was afforded, or Jack Teixeira is likely to get, even though his crimes are far, far worse than theirs.
Thanks to his age, any sentence of five years or more for Trump will become a de facto life sentence. That is some comfort, but only some. It still rankles that Trump, arguably the biggest criminal in American history, will be treated with so much kid-glove leniency. And of course, looming over it all is the undeniable certainty that a Republican President’s first official act will probably be to grant the bastard a full presidential pardon or commutation — there’s always that.
So when a MAGA Republican tells you that the system is rigged, they’re right in a way that they are too blind and too stupid to comprehend. Despite his crimes Trump enjoys unrestricted freedom and virtually no limit to his exercise of hate speech. He enjoys massive support from the corrupt party that he controls with an iron fist. He is only constrained from discussing the case with his co-defendant, a constraint he will unquestionably flout.
Watergate’s legacy is a world where monsters like Trump can thrive. With prudence and justice as our guides we can correct that legacy and keep such monsters from ever poisoning us again. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.