Associated Press
President Richard Nixon bids farewell to members of the White House staff gathered in the East Room of the Executive Mansion, August 9, 1974.
’Twasn’t ever thus. Republicans haven’t always responded to the clear criminality of a Republican president with indifference, or with fury at those who call the crime a crime.
In 1973, when the Senate special committee chaired by North Carolina Democrat Sam Ervin held hearings on Watergate, it was the committee’s Republican staff that discovered the closet holding the smoking gun. Staffers for the ranking member, Howard Baker (R-TN), deposed mid-level White House aide Alexander Butterfield, and asked him if there were any tapes of President Nixon’s discussions, about which some witnesses had already speculated. Butterfield, after noting that he wished they hadn’t asked him, answered that Nixon had a voice-activated system that taped every one of his discussions.
The committee unanimously subpoenaed those tapes, and when the Supreme Court ordered Nixon to hand them over in the summer of 1974, they showed Nixon directing the FBI and CIA to cover up the break-in. At that point, the ten Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee who had voted in committee against impeaching the president all announced they would now support impeachment. Barry Goldwater traveled to the White House to tell Nixon he had virtually no support among Senate Republicans either. The following day, Nixon announced his resignation. His approval rating in the polls taken after the release of the tapes—after the smoking gun went off—was just over 20 percent, which meant that at least half the country’s Republicans wanted Nixon gone.
Today, Donald Trump still commands the support of more than 80 percent of his fellow Republicans, which is why his approval rating is about twice that of Nixon’s. To be sure, two years elapsed between the Watergate burglary and Nixon’s resignation, but Trump’s cascade of presidential improprieties has been unfolding for two and a half years.
A straightforward reading of U.S. law makes clear that Trump’s threat to Ukrainian President Zelensky violated 52 U.S. Code 30121, which makes it unlawful for “a person to solicit, accept, or receive a contribution or donation described in subparagraph A of paragraph 1 from a foreign national.” That subparagraph A defines what it’s unlawful to solicit, accept, or receive as “a contribution or donation of money or other thing of value … in connection with a Federal, State, or local election.” 99.999 percent of the American people don’t know the particulars of 52 U.S. Code 30121, but only those in tribal denial don’t grasp that threatening Ukraine unless it cooked up something to help Trump besmirch Joe Biden violated something fundamental.
So why the difference between 2019 and 1974? Why no Republican demands to investigate Trump? What changed the Republican Party over those 45 years? Nixon, after all, relied on tribal enmity no less than Trump. Nixon’s campaigns railed against Democrats, whom it mushed together with radicals, crazy kids, militant blacks, and hippies. His 1972 campaign turned George McGovern, his Democratic opponent, into the candidate of acid, amnesty, and abortion. His history of red-baiting went all the way back to his initial 1946 run for Congress, when he linked the liberal Democratic incumbent he unseated, Jerry Voorhis, to the Communist Party, which Voorhis opposed. And as president, Nixon and his vice president Spiro Agnew went after the “liberal media”—specifically, the Times, the Post, and CBS—claiming they distorted the news and secretly sought to bring America down. Nixon was a vastly more intelligent pol (and man) than Trump, but he built his career on the fear and loathing he stoked within his base for his political adversaries.
Nonetheless, Nixon’s tribe bowed to the evidence and deserted him at the end—all of the Republican electeds, and probably most of the rank and file.
So why the difference now? What enables Republicans to deny, ignore, or not care about the evidence—not just in the Ukrainian affair but the little kids in cages and the thousand other shocks to which Trump has subjected the nation? That denial, ignorance, and indifference extends well beyond the case of Donald Trump, to such other notable realities as planet-threatening climate change. How did the “ism” that Republicans scorn the most become empiricism?
There are a host of explanations for why and how Republicans have cocooned themselves from reality, not least the realignment of Southern whites into the GOP, which pushed the party to embrace a much more hard-right politics that drove many moderates into the Democrats’ ranks. But the rise of right-wing mass media may well be the most important factor differentiating ’19 from ’74. In 1974, right-wing media remained on the fringe, save in portions of the white South. Most Americans came to understand Watergate from the newscasts of the three national television networks, and from the hearings those networks aired. There was no counterfactual counternarrative coming from Fox News, as there was no Fox News. There were right-wing radio commentators, but few if any were national: Father Coughlin was gone and Rush Limbaugh had yet to arrive. Rupert Murdoch had only recently relocated to Britain from Australia (to which, if we had an immigration policy that penalized the truly evil, he would be instantly deported). If Trump is polling at twice Nixon’s final-days level, and if congressional Republicans still sing Trump’s praises for fear of estranging their counterfactually oriented base, Fox and its ilk are substantially to blame.
Which brings us to the Joe Biden problem. No, not the Joe Biden Ukraine problem, which appears to exist only in the Republicans’ counterfactual universe. The Joe Biden problem is his failure to grasp that Republicans live in that counterfactual universe, which was smaller, fringier, more niche in 1974, when he was still in the first part of his first term in the Senate.
In insisting that he can reach accords with Mitch McConnell (like the one that put Merrick Garland on the Supreme Court, I suppose), that he can and will advance policies and personnel that both parties can support, Biden acts as if all Americans were still getting their news from Walter Cronkite. He doesn’t seem to understand that one party has seceded from the fact-based world into the fiery, bigoted underworld of Hannity, Carlson, Limbaugh, and social media conspiracy theories. Never mind the record player; the guy doesn’t even know what’s on TV, on radio, on Facebook—and how that’s changed American politics.
Would Richard Nixon have been compelled to resign, even once the Watergate smoking gun was found, still smoking, if Fox News had been around in 1974? Quite possibly, not. Republicans now inhabit a different world than their forebears, encased behind walls through which facts seldom flow.
