In the end, none of this was to any avail. For all the cover-ups, the efforts to stifle the press, and the stoking of his pugilistic base, Nixon failed to save himself. That his demise was not primarily a consequence of the Democrats control of Congress is due to the fact that some of his most reliable and powerful allies in both chambers were Democrats. Even as Nixons race-baiting southern strategy was hastening the realignment of the GOP as a new home for conservative southern Democrats (like the Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond, who had defected to the Republicans in 1964), most in Congress had yet to transition, as typified by the segregationist Mississippi senators James Eastland and John Stennis, both Democrats and firm Nixon supporters. Even Sam Ervin, the North Carolina Democrat who presided over the 1973 Watergate hearings, was a segregationist and Vietnam War hawk who, as the historian Rick Perlstein has pointed out, was one of the most loyal votes for Nixon in the Senate and had initially declared that it was simply inconceivable that Nixon might have been involved in the White House horrors.
A related misperception that some present-day liberals tend to retrofit to 1973 has it that the Washington Republican leadership of that time included ballsy, principled moderates who would speak truth to their gangster president as the pathetic Trump lackeys Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan will not. If only. A few Republican senators did ask tough questions during the Watergate hearings Howard Baker and Lowell Weicker, famously but it took even them a year after the Watergate break-in to find their voices, and they were not in the leadership. Then, as now, so-called Establishment Republicans were more likely to gripe about Nixon in private or in not-for-attribution conversations with reporters. In public, they usually cowered, sparing the president their harshest criticism and cordoning him off from impeachable offenses out of fear of him and his base. The Republican minority leader in the House, the Arizona congressman John Rhodes, found his mail running three to one against Nixon until he talked about a possible presidential resignation; then the count flipped to eight to one in Nixons favor.
One Watergate lesson Trump failed to heed: Dont antagonize the FBI.
It was not until three months before Nixon did quit that a trio of Republican senators all up for election that fall called for him either to resign or step aside temporarily under the 25th Amendment. More typical were towers of Jell-O like the secretary of the Interior, Rogers Morton, a former Maryland congressman and chairman of the Republican National Committee. In that same month, May 1974, he told the Times he was having a very difficult time in living with what he called a breakdown in our ethics of government only to pop up in the Post 24 hours later saying that he was not going to jump off the ship until theres evidence that the ship is sinking. (And he still held on tight, surviving in the Cabinet after Gerald Ford assumed the presidency.)
Nor did Nixons base ever desert him. At the nadir of Watergate, Nixons approval rating fell to 27 percent; by the time he resigned, that number had dropped to 24 percent. In other words, at least a quarter of the American populace had no problem telling pollsters that they were still behind a president who had lied repeatedly and engaged in unambiguously criminal conspiracies. They still saw Nixon as one of us, as he billed himself on posters in his first House run in 1946, and as a fighter who took on them essentially the same elites that Trump inveighs against today.
Trumps base is roughly the same size as Nixons then, or only a shade less. At FiveThirtyEight, Nate Silver quantifies that base as voters who strongly approve of Trump, a figure that peaked at 30 after the Inaugural and had dropped to 21 to 22 percent by late May. They will no more abandon Trump than their parents and grandparents did Nixon. If anything, Trumps ascent has once more confirmed that this constituency is a permanent factor in the American political equation. Should Trump follow Nixon into ignominy, that base may in time rally around a more cunning and durable Trump a new Nixon, if you will. He will be far scarier than an understudy like Pence, who is unlikely to survive his association with a tainted president any longer than Ford did (if even that long). Future Democrats may be just as ineffectual at stopping the next right-wing populist before he (or she) lands in the White House, but thats a depression for another day.
