THESE FOOLISH THINGS REMIND ME OF

In September, 1975, TV executives involved with ABC Sports and Monday Night Football launched a short-lived variety show called “Saturday Night Live With Howard Cosell.”  It had a comedy unit called “The Prime Time Players,” featuring Bill Murray. 

A month later, NBC launched its famous late night “Saturday Night Live,” which lampooned Cosell by calling its cast “The Not Ready For Prime Time Players.”  Cosell’s show was cancelled after 18 episodes.  NBC’s “Saturday Night Live,” which recruited Bill Murray in 1977, is still around, though they dropped their “Not Ready for Prime Time Players” bit after the fifth season. 

As Karl Marx wrote in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, history repeats itself, “first as tragedy, then as farce.”  Which brings us to the administration of Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States.  Less than a hundred days into the Trump administration, it is already clear that these guys aren’t ready for prime time.  Here’s a quote that sums up the Trump presidency so far: "The truth is these are not very smart guys and things got out of hand."  Hold that thought.

I’ll turn 70 in a couple of weeks, and I’ve seen a lot of political scandals.  Some of them tempests in a teapot, blown out of proportion for political purposes (Whitewater, Benghazi).  Some of them involved military failures (pretty much every war in my adult lifetime, from Vietnam to Iraq), which always had political repercussions, even if there was no consensus on what went wrong (“bad idea in the first place” vs. “traitors in our midst sabotaged our military successes.”)  We’ve seen failures in regulatory oversight of the financial sector that ruined lives, and we’ve seen failures of personal morality that ruined careers.  And we’ve seen Watergate, the so-called third rate burglary that ended the presidency of Richard Nixon.

Donald Trump’s intentions are abominable, but his attempts to implement them have been comically inept.  Even things that aren’t illegal have been dumb and dumber.  We’ve watched Trump’s personal insecurity, which led him to destroy his credibility by complaining about coverage of the size of the crowd at his inauguration, and inflating the magnitude of his Electoral College victory.  We’ve seen Trump’s failure even to nominate people to fill hundreds of senior positions in the executive branch, which limits the administration’s ability to achieve its agenda.  Don’t get me wrong – given what Trump and the Republicans are trying to accomplish, I’m glad they’re incompetent.  But the fact remains that they’re incompetent.

Nevertheless, the piece de resistance among Donald Trump’s scandals is the Russian intervention in our presidential election.  Trump fans have repeatedly protested that no wrongdoing has yet been proven.  True enough, but the operative word in that sentence is “yet.”  Last week brought word that Mike Flynn is asking for immunity from prosecution in exchange for his testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee.  As Flynn and Trump both noted last fall, you don’t ask for immunity unless you’re guilty of something.

Common sense says that Republicans who honestly believe that Donald Trump is innocent would be pushing hard for an independent, impartial investigation:  clear the air, refute the allegations of impropriety, and let Trump move forward.  But that’s not what happening.  Instead, Trump and his defenders are trying to shut down or obstruct the ongoing investigations. 

That’s pretty convincing evidence that Trump’s defenders do NOT in fact believe that Trump is innocent.  It suggests precisely the opposite – they’re scared to death of what an investigation might reveal.  As long as Trump and his crew keep acting like they’ve got something to hide, there’s no reason to overthink the matter.  They’ve got something to hide.

There are major differences between Watergate and Russiagate, but a comparison of the two scandals may be useful in helping to project a possible Trump endgame.  The arc of the earlier scandal looked something like this. 

1.       In June, 1972, Republican functionaries burglarized the files of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate office complex, hoping to find information that would help Richard Nixon win re-election.  But Nixon didn’t need any extra help; he won in a landslide.  Stealing files from Democrats was both reckless and wholly unnecessary.

2.       An FBI investigation traces the burglars to Nixon’s re-election campaign.  The burglars are sentenced to prison in January, 1973.

3.       Nixon and his top aides, worried that more scrutiny of the Watergate break-in would reveal additional illegal/ unethical activity, lie to the Attorney General about their knowledge of the burglary.  The cover-up takes on a life of its own. 

4.       Over the spring and summer of 1973, the cover-up begins to unravel, as key aides begin to take plea bargains and tell what they know.  The investigation gets closer and closer to Nixon himself. 

5.       In July, 1973, a Senate committee learns that Nixon secretly taped conversations in the White House Oval Office.  The committee subpoenas the tapes, which Nixon refuses to supply, citing “national security” reasons. 

6.       On October 20, 1973, Nixon fires the Special Watergate Prosecutor for demanding the Oval Office tapes.  Senior Justice Department officials resign in protest, and the firing, known as the Saturday Night Massacre, is widely seen as an admission of guilt.  By the end of the month, polls indicated that a plurality of Americans favored Nixon’s impeachment. 

7.       Over the next ten months, the impeachment process played out, as more and more reluctant Republicans saw the writing on the wall.  Nixon’s attempts at covering up a trivial crime amounted to obstruction of justice.  He was impeached by the House in late July, 1974, and resigned on August 9, 1974, before his Senate trial began.  Nearly twenty people, ranging from the Attorney General and senior aides to random burglars hired by campaign officials, did time in prison as a result of the scandal. 

8.       Nixon’s successor, Gerald Ford, pardoned Nixon on September 8, 2974.

Eight months after Donald Trump’s infamous “Russia, if you’re listening” speech, I’d say we’re somewhere in the vicinity of the fourth bullet in the Watergate saga. 

Trump has been able to bluff, bully, and buy his way out of trouble his entire life.  He and his close advisors (Roger Stone and Rudy Giuliani) haven’t been able to resist bragging about their advance knowledge of the Russian hacks (see the link below for details).  Their arrogance will come back to haunt them. 

Trump’s sock puppet, Devin Nunes, has been comically inept at trying to stall or derail his House Intelligence Committee investigation.  In the past two weeks, it has become so clear that Nunes is working for Trump that the Senate Intelligence Committee has basically said, “Step aside, sonny, and let the grownups handle this.”

Trump defenders who cling to the point that no wrongdoing has yet been proved would do well to remember the Watergate timeline.  It’s early days yet.  A year and a half after the Watergate break-in, most Republicans in Congress were still defending Nixon.  They lived to regret it. 

Early in this essay, I quoted something that summed up the Trump presidency:  "The truth is these are not very smart guys and things got out of hand."  That quote came from a man who was known as Deep Throat, the anonymous government employee who helped Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein uncover the Watergate scandal in the early 1970s. 

The men around Trump, like the men around Nixon, think they’re smart enough to break the rules and get away with it.  They’re about to find out how wrong they’ve been.