I’ll admit it. I’ve gotten just as much of a tingle up and down my spine with all this Watergate and impeachment chatter as anyone else. When David Gergen said on May 16 “I think we’re in impeachment territory,” I swooned along with so many others.
It isn’t going to happen, however, certainly not with what’s on the table right now. Nor did James Comey’s testimony, electric though it was, move the impeachment needle. Republicans in Congress are first and foremost “Team Trump” and they have demonstrated repeatedly that party comes before patriotism. Trump said during the campaign that he could shoot someone and not lose his supporters and I think he’s probably right. Things might – might – change should Democrats take the House next year but the odds of that remain long too.
But maybe that’s a good thing. Impeaching Trump might take our eyes off the ball and causing us to lose sight of the bigger picture.
All this buzz about impeachment inevitably brings us back to Richard Nixon. (No one, except Newt and The Gingrich Gang, ever thought Bill Clinton’s lies about his tawdry affair amounted to an impeachable offense). That’s why all those Watergate veterans, including Gergen, have been trotted out to compare then and now.
Let’s skip that comparison. We are only at the beginning of Trumpgate anyway so any discussions of who violated the Constitution more are entirely premature. Instead, let’s move forward to August 9, 1974, the day after Nixon helicoptered off the White House lawn into historical infamy, and look at what happened next.
Gerald Ford had the most thankless job in America on August 9. He had to clean up the political mess Nixon left and he had to restore some measure of faith in our system to the American people that Nixon had so thoroughly corroded. And within eighteen months of taking office, the only person ever to serve as president who had never been elected to the executive branch had to run for the office. In between Ford had to wind down the failed and shameful war in Vietnam.
He pardoned Richard Nixon a month after he took office and he paid for it at the polls. Such was the disgust at Nixon and Watergate that Democrats wound up with big majorities in the Congress elected in the fall of 1974 – 291 to 144 in the House and 60-40 in the Senate. That post-Watergate, post-pardon anger continued through the start of the 1976 presidential campaign season. Ford trailed Democratic nominee Jimmy Carter by as many as 30 points in the polls and Ford looked like the lamest of ducks. Things didn’t turn out that way by November. Carter won with a 53.5% majority of the popular vote. That’s a healthy mandate to be sure, but a long way from the polls that showed him walking away with the race without breaking a sweat.
Carter was a better president than he got credit for at the time, or than he’s gotten subsequently. The 1970s were a rough time for politics in this country in many ways, and Carter like Ford was dealt a bad hand – rising inflation, hostages held in Tehran and more. But it is surely true that he did not play that hand very skillfully. By the time he ran for re-election in 1980 he was not a strong incumbent. Even so, Ronald Reagan’s triumph in that election stunned many political observers.
A scant six years after Nixon resigned from office disgraced and humiliated, therefore, Americans elected the most conservative Republican to hold the presidency since Calvin Coolidge. Republicans picked up 12 Senate seats too, giving them a majority for the first time since the 1950s. By the tenth anniversary of Nixon’s departure from power Ronald Reagan was waltzing his way toward an easy re-election. Nixon and his crimes had either been forgiven or forgotten.
Looked at from this distance, the Republican Party suffered almost no political consequence for Nixon or for Watergate. In fact, the party reinvented its image so successfully after 1974 that Nixon and Watergate seem somehow entirely divorced in the public imagination from the party he had so much to do with shaping.
After the Civil War, Republican candidates ran for at least a generation by “waving the bloody shirt” – blaming the war on Democrats. It worked more often than not. From the 1930s through the 1960s, Democrats blamed the Great Depression on Republicans. It too was a pretty successful strategy. After Watergate, however, the Democratic Party did not make the GOP pay for Nixon. He slunk off to Yorba Linda and his party moved on is if he hadn’t happened.
Here’s the lesson, then, for those us dreaming fevered dreams of a Trump impeachment. It might get rid of the man but doing so won’t necessarily punish the party which has coddled and enabled him in the first place. The task moving forward is to figure out how best to make the Republican Party own Donald Trump. Lock, stock and barrel, and for a very long time.
Steven Conn is the W. E. Smith Professor of History at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.