Even Nixon is shaking his head...

Even the ghost of Watergate thinks Trump went too far

Opinion by Jane Greenway Carr

“The creator must become an outlaw,” wrote high-wire artist Philippe Petit in the foreword of his book, “Creativity: The Perfect Crime” (for which he chose a more bracing epigraph from Henri Matisse: “Creativity takes courage.”)

In the early morning hours of August 7, 1974, Petit walked his way into history atop a high wire stretched 131 feet between the Twin Towers in lower Manhattan. His performance — walking back and forth, lying down on the wire, saluting the sky — was deemed by some the “artistic crime of the century.”

On the same day Petit undertook his fateful outlaw act, Stevie Wonder released the single, “You Haven’t Done Nothin’,” a funk song featuring background vocals by The Jackson 5. The single’s B-side, “Big Brother,” was taken from a previous album, but the pairing makes thematic sense. “Big Brother” is a fierce indictment of a power structure that surveils and oppresses while poverty and suffering proliferate. “You Haven’t Done Nothin’” is a straight-up protest song against one unnamed political leader, which opens with the lines: “We are amazed but not amused / By all the things you say that you’ll do.”

The next evening in a televised address, that unnamed politician, President Richard Nixon,

announced his resignation.

For a hot week in August 1974, the spectacle of crime — whether embodied in a performance more than 1,300 feet above ground or by a dishonored commander-in-chief in the White House — took center stage. What Wonder’s song interjected was the element of truth. “You brought this upon yourself,” he sang. “We want the truth and nothing else.”

Who will write the protest song of the moment we’re in now? A disgraced president still dominates our discourse, but the question of who speaks the truth — or what the truth even is — has become far more complicated. With the news this week that former President Donald Trump has been indicted on a total of 37 counts, including 31 related to the handling of national defense documents — marking the first time a former president has faced federal charges — it seems that the ghost of Watergate may soon have to adjust its position in history.

“Next year will mark 50 years since President Richard Nixon resigned as a result of the Watergate scandal. Given that the GOP has tried to position itself as the party of ‘law and order’ ever since, it’s ironic that the Republican nominee in 2024 could be a former president who has been indicted in more than one criminal probe,” wrote Julian Zelizer. And yet, “Trump denies any and all wrongdoing and continues to remain the leader of the pack. At this point, the odds of any other Republican usurping him still seem low. How did this happen? How has Trump remained such a towering figure within the party?”

Addressing the details of the indictment, Norman Eisen noted that special counsel Jack Smith repeatedly cited Executive Order 13526, which revamped the classification system for national security documents. Eisen helped write that executive order while serving as former President Barack Obama’s special counsel for ethics and government reform. “When former President Donald Trump took office in 2017, he left the rules in place. That will surely come back to haunt him in the classified documents probe,” Eisen wrote.

“In each of his defenses, Trump is running up against the core American idea that no one, not even an ex-president, is above the law. The classification system and the declassification rules represented by our executive order are a central part of the legal limits that apply here – making this indictment the greatest legal danger yet for the former president,” argued Eisen. “It is one that he could have perhaps avoided if he had studied the order a little more closely — and followed it.”