IF THE CRIMES OF WATERGATE OCCURRED TODAY, WOULD THEY EVEN BE ILLEGAL?

J.D. Vance is trolling us again:

Vance described his admiration for Nixon during a conversation Thursday at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library in Yorba Linda, California....

“If Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be like a 12-hour news story. The idea that it would have taken down a presidency is crazy,” Vance said.

Some observers see this as a comment on modern attention spans. In The New York Times, Matthew Purdy writes:

... Mr. Vance ... speaks from experience about the current life cycle of scandals, which age like fruit flies.

Questions of impropriety — or worse — buzz around, then flutter off. Presidential stock trades are replaced by pardons to contributors, which are replaced by new presidential branding schemes, which are replaced by contracts to the connected, which are replaced by elective surgery to national landmarks.

Well, actually, we've been talking about a particular act of "elective surgery to national landmarks" -- the failed restoration of the Reflecting Pool on the National Mall -- for nearly two weeks. Scandals don't always have a twelve-hour lifespan.

But a modern Watergate might fail to break through as a scandal for a simple reason: most or all of it would probably be legal, or at least "presumptively" legal.

The event that set off the Watergate scandal was a break-in at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate complex. Operatives associated with President Nixon's reelection campaign were caught burglarizing the office and planting listening devices. Another notorious act was a break-in at the office of a psychiatrist treating Daniel Ellsberg, a government analyst who'd become a folk hero for leaking the Pentagon Papers.

When Trump ran for reelection in 2020, some people in his inner circle warned him against outrageous acts, or refused to execute such acts. Also, he didn't have the cover of the 2024 Trump v. United States decision, in which the Supreme Court ruled that, as Oyez puts it, "A former U.S. President has absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions within his conclusive and preclusive constitutional authority, [and] at least presumptive immunity from prosecution for all his official acts."

Trump isn't permitted to run for reelection in 2028, and he (probably!) won't try to defy the Constitution by trying to run, so we don't know how far he'd go if he were running again, under what appears to be blanket immunity for official acts, and with a staff that never defies him. He's trying to win the midterms for congressional Republicans through acts of dubious legality -- seizing ballots from past elections, demanding voter rolls from states -- but he might reach Nixon levels of depravity if he were planning to run again himself.

But he wouldn't do it all surreptitiously, under the aegis of his camapign -- he'd do it as president. He'd claim he had to do what he did in the interests of national security.

I don't know how long the story would remain in the news. I don't know whether the targets of his acts would be able to find relief in the courts. But most of Nixon's crimes wouldn't even be treated as crimes if Trump ordered them now.