How Can We Rewrite Emerging History in the Era of Trump?

I lived through Watergate when I was a law student. It was the defining event of that part of my education: the attempted break-in at DNC headquarters months before I began classes, the initial investigations, the summertime hearings on PBS during which White House employee Alexander Butterfield—mild-mannered and matter of fact—was asked the key question, i.e., whether Nixon taped his conversations, and the John Dean testimony identifying that famous “cancer on the presidency.”

Five of the burglars were pressured to keep quiet and plead guilty, Nixon’s top three assistants H. R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, and Attorney General John Mitchell were convicted of all criminal charges and served prison sentences, and after being ordered by the Supreme Court to turn over his surreptitious White House tapes, Nixon resigned rather than suffer the indignity (and loss of pension) of being formally impeached by the House and convicted by the Senate.

A number of other members of the Nixon administration also ended up in the slammer after trying to lie their way out of culpability.

I watched the final hearings of the Senate Judiciary Committee propelled by Chairman Democratic Senator Sam Irvin of North Carolina, who described himself as “just a country lawyer” but was, in truth, a wily and effective chairman aided by a team of prosecutors who had both the legal skills and a congressional majority to bore their way through the miasma of lies.

I also watched the denouement of the proceedings the following year on a television screen during a brief vacation on Martha’s Vineyard when Nixon made his desperate V-signs to the press and public as he paused after his resignation to take a helicopter from the White House lawn to transfer to a flight back to San Clemente.

The storyline was remarkable, at that juncture unique in American history, and ultimately understandable as all the pieces fell into place, with one member of Nixon’s staff after another facing a prison sentence for perjury, obstruction of justice, and a variety of other crimes.

Those of us who lived through this period are shaking our heads at the spate of events and new complications that continue to splat across cable news headlines in the Era of Trump. We know that Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team surely has access to the details of these revelations and their underlying ramifications, but we’re having trouble wrapping our heads around all the permutations and combinations.

Mueller’s team is relentless, experienced, and zealous. In our hearts we know that ultimately it will reveal crimes still unknown to the public, virulent motivations, and schemes that shock the conscience. We are anxious to understand both the disreputable incentives and the banality of their execution by the greedy con artists making an execrable effort to conduct the business of the country to suit their own financial interests.

For honor is a concept better exemplified by the past than the frightening present with its reliance on personal profits, reality television show-runners, and their ilk.

New revelations are manifest daily by diligent reporters, determined counsel for injured parties, foreign investigators, and unnamed sources hiding in the shadows. Even the compromised Trump Department of Justice surprises us with some unexpected assistance.

This emerging era of social media, presidential tweets, boasting White House counsel, continually breaking news, international reverberations, global players engaging in treason, conspiracy, and bribery, porn stars, money laundering, and influence peddling by Trump’s fixer Michael Cohen is complicated, and unlike avid crossword puzzle aficionados, we are as yet unable to fill in all the blanks. Some of them remain empty in the huge tapestry of tips, partial answers, classified information, and suppositions supplied by a host of relators:

1. “Leakers” among the White House staff who find the current circumstances reprehensible. Another term for these staffers under siege is “brave” civil servants. Yet another might be foolhardy facilitators of a malignant chief executive.

2. Disgruntled and/or fired staffers who were ushered out of the Trump White House after being publicly exposed for one illegality or another, running afoul of Trump’s mixed messages, or simply reaching their limits of service to a madman.

3. A host of female informants who were sexually assaulted or abused by Trump over the years and are now asserting a variety of damage claims against the president.

4. Politicians with a genuine conscience vis-à-vis government service (or at least a hope of being reelected in November). It is often hard to tell these motives apart.

5. Bona fide public servants who have always trod the path of the greater good and rejected the siren call of self-aggrandizement.

What kind of patriot are you, dear reader? Will you be able to say in days to come that you resisted the sweeping forces of destruction and greed? And that you did your best to uphold the rule of law in the country we have made—for good or for bad—out of the revolutionary concepts of our founding fathers (and mothers)?

And, further, that you came forward to be counted and make a difference when it mattered most?

Let us rewrite our history books as we struggle against the insanity of these times and the ascendancy of a man whose instincts mirror those of the worst autocrats of history. We owe this to our children and grandchildren. We owe this to posterity. We owe this to the world.