The unfolding scandal rocked the United States and led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon two years later, who went down in history as a villain.
But half a century later, in the eyes of many observers, another president is guilty of far more serious crimes: The USA is in the middle of processing Donald Trump’s campaign against his election defeat in 2020 and the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Many are therefore moving to the 50th anniversary of the Watergate-Breaking comparisons between Trump and Nixon – and almost see Nixon in a mild light.
“One of the ironies is that Nixon didn’t have to order a burglary to win the election,” says history professor Michael Green of the University of Nevada at Las Vegas. In fact, Nixon secured months after that Watergate-Intrusion designed to spy on the Democrats with a landslide victory over their candidate George McGovern for a second term. “And there’s no indication that there was ever any talk or thought of overturning the outcome of the election if he lost,” Green said.
“And then came Trump”
Trump, on the other hand, launched an unprecedented campaign to reverse the outcome of the election and stay in power after losing the November 2020 presidential election to Democrat Joe Biden. The sad low point was the bloody attack by Trump supporters on the Capitol, when Biden’s election victory was to be certified there.
Trump’s campaign of spreading false allegations of voter fraud is “a scam beyond Nixon’s imagination,” write investigative journalists Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, who wrote the report Watergate– uncovered scandal. Half a century after Nixon, they assumed that never again would a self-interested US president “trample on the national interest and undermine democracy,” emphasize the reporter legends. “And then came Trump.”
But while Nixon because Watergate had to resign, Trump remained in the White House until the end of his term of office, which was marked by numerous scandals and affairs – and is now even the strongman of his Republican Party again. In the case of Nixon in 1974, it was the Republicans who urged the president to resign, making it clear to him that he could no longer count on their support in Congress and would be impeached from the White House if he did not go himself.
Five decades later, with a few exceptions, Republicans stood by Trump and avoided an impeachment conviction. For observers, this is a consequence of the increasing political polarization in the USA, which has strengthened camp thinking.
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Watergate changed the media world
The public is also much more divided today than it was in the 1970s. “In the times of Watergate Americans were united and trusted their media sources as part of a national conversation,” says former CNN anchor Rick Sanchez. “Today that’s impossible.”
The conservative base is still behind Trump and largely ignores the coming to terms with the storming of the Capitol. To Watergate sometimes 80 million television viewers tuned in to public hearings on the scandal. When a parliamentary inquiry into the storming of the Capitol held its first public hearing last week, there were only 20 million TV viewers. The conservative news channel Fox News simply did not broadcast live.
Source: Nachrichten
