Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senator Chuck Schumer. (photo: Getty)
04 January 19
ome presidents have really bad years.
For Nixon, it was 1974 — the Watergate year, which
ended with his resignation. For Clinton, it was 1998 — the Monica year,
which culminated with an impeachment trial in the Senate in 1999. He won
that vote easily and came out more popular than before.
It’s a good guess that Donald Trump’s really bad year
will be 2019. And it’s not yet clear whether he’ll survive, like
Clinton, or be forced out of office, like Nixon.
Nixon’s worst year resulted from crimes in his 1972
reelection effort, when burglars working for the campaign got caught
breaking into the Democratic headquarters, and then Nixon and others
conspired to stop the break-in investigation and cover up what had
happened.
The events that brought Clinton to an impeachment
trial in the Senate had nothing to do with his political campaigns. His
misdeeds were strictly personal: He had sex with a White House intern,
Monica Lewinsky, and then denied it under oath.
The storm clouds gathering around Trump involve both the personal and
the political.
More than a dozen federal and state investigations are
underway focused on Trump and those who worked on his election effort.
He will also soon be facing aggressive congressional investigations by
the House Democrats.
It’s easy to get lost in the details of Russiagate and
the guilty pleas of Trump associates involved in a range of crimes, but
what is developing is not that complicated: It’s a political corruption
scandal with the potential to be larger than anything we’ve seen before
in American history.
The infamous Trump Tower meeting, where Don Jr., Jared
Kushner and campaign chief Paul Manafort met with a Russian operative
offering help in the election, could turn out to be far worse than
anything that happened in Watergate. And Trump’s sexual troubles would
be worse than Clinton’s, too, if he is found to have violated campaign
funding laws in trying to buy the silence of women he slept with.
Still, there are many similarities between Trump’s troubles and earlier presidential scandals — along with some differences.
Both Nixon and Clinton faced allegations of
obstruction of justice. They were tripped up not so much by the acts
themselves, but rather by attempts to cover them up.
Obstruction is also a focus of the investigations
facing Trump. For Trump, the possible obstruction involves his efforts
to stop the Russiagate investigation and his firing of FBI Director
James Comey.
Trump is also facing potential charges that neither
Nixon nor Clinton had to deal with.
The biggest question is whether
Russiagate was a quid pro quo in which Russia offered to help Trump win
the election in exchange for Trump easing Russia sanctions. We will
probably learn more this year about what Russia did, exactly, during the
election, both with “information influence” spread through social media
and cyberattacks on the Dems. But the big question will remain what the
Trump campaign knew about those efforts, and who exactly was in the
loop.
Trump also faces campaign finance issues that neither
Nixon nor Clinton had to deal with. If, as Trump’s former lawyer Michael
Cohen has said, Trump directed that payments be made to two women to
keep them silent during the election campaign, then the payments could
be construed as illegal campaign contributions.
Trump also faces allegations that he violated the
emoluments provision of the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits federal
officeholders from receiving payments from foreign or state governments
while in office. The attorneys general of the District of Columbia and
Maryland argue that Trump violated the emoluments clause by receiving
money from foreign governments while holding office, through hotels
owned by his family.
And if that weren’t enough, Trump also faces
investigations into alleged illegalities at the Trump Foundation and in
the fundraising and spending by his inauguration committee.
Nixon’s troubles hold another possible caution for
Trump in a year when committees in the House will almost certainly be
subpoenaing the president’s tax returns. For Nixon, news that he had
violated tax laws by taking an illegal write-off did a lot to turn the
public against him. Nixon had backdated the deed of gift of his papers
to the National Archives in order to take his write-off in a more
advantageous year.
People who shrugged off Watergate on the grounds that
“everybody does it” were outraged that the president had claimed an
illegal deduction of $576,000 — the equivalent today of more than $3
million.
We don’t know whether Trump’s tax returns contain
dubious write-offs, but it seems likely we’ll find that out this year —
and also, perhaps, whether the public is more forgiving of him than of
Nixon for tax shenanigans.
Both Clinton and Nixon faced impeachment proceedings.
The House Judiciary Committee voted articles of impeachment in 1974
against Nixon, but the full House never voted on them, and the Senate
never held an impeachment trial. He resigned before that — and was
promptly pardoned by his successor, his former vice president, Gerald
Ford, for any crimes he may have committed. Clinton was impeached by the
House and went on to face a Senate trial, which fell far short of the
required two-thirds vote for conviction.
I’m betting that, in the end, Trump resigns and gets
an advance pardon for himself and his children. That may not happen
until 2020, but in the meantime, 2019 will be the worst year of his
life.
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