A power-hungry president had twisted the government into a tool for his personal political benefit. His aides kept an “enemies list” of opponents to be punished. His cronies ran the Justice Department and he made puppets of other agencies that were meant to be independent. Corporations that wanted favorable treatment from the White House were pressured to make illegal contributions to the president’s political coffers.
As revelations of rot in the Nixon administration tumbled out through the 1970s, Senator Lawton Chiles, Democrat of Florida, captured the alarm of the Watergate era: “Nothing will bring the Republic to its knees so quickly as a bone-deep mistrust of the government by its own people,” he said. “We have seen other democracies fall within our own lifetime. Fall through internal corruption rather than outside invasion.”
The Watergate scandal had convulsed the nation. Coming near the end of the disastrous war in Vietnam, the scandal sent trust in the presidency into a tailspin. The sense of shock and shame prompted an extraordinary period of bipartisan congressional activism to impose checks on the power of the presidency.
Nearly all corners of the government were touched by the reforms, which included new ethical safeguards, strengthened protections for federal workers against political pressure, restrictions on the president’s power to unilaterally declare war. And a succession of attorneys general established rules to block White House involvement in Justice Department prosecutions.
The aim was not just to excise what one aide to President Richard M. Nixon described as “a cancer,” but to prevent a recurrence. “Watergate reform is not for the past or for the present,” Senator Lowell P. Weicker Jr., a Connecticut Republican, wrote in a 1976 addendum to a Senate report. “Our memories may indeed keep us free today. It is for unborn generations who will never know firsthand how close a democracy came to oligarchy.”
From the opening days of his second term, President Trump took aim at Watergate’s ethical checkpoints as if in a shooting gallery. First, he fired 17 inspectors general, a job established in the Watergate era to ferret out waste, fraud and abuse in government. He also fired the head of the Office of Special Counsel, an independent agency created by legislation in 1978 legislation to protect government whistle-blowers. Then he fired the director of the Office of Government Ethics, created around the same time to guard against financial conflicts of interest by top government officials. And he has used the Justice Department and the F.B.I. as political tools, roles they worked to shed after Watergate.
A strain of conservative legal thinking has been aiming to reassert the president’s powers ever since they were curbed in the post-Watergate era. But while Mr. Trump’s lawyers successfully make the case for expanding presidential authority based on a high-minded Constitutional argument, there is a raw political result. He has removed barriers that might slow his pursuit of a highly personal presidency — punishing opponents and rewarding allies and financial backers while also reaping profits for family businesses that intersect with his powers as president.
Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat who was a young Senate aide in the 1970s, said “what we never foresaw was a leader who was so totally defiant and shameless.”
“He essentially decimated all the watchdogs that had been established post-Watergate,” Mr. Blumenthal said of Mr. Trump.
John Yoo, a Berkeley law school professor and veteran of the George W. Bush Justice Department who is a critic of post-Watergate constraints on the presidency, nonetheless acknowledges that weakening those protections can cut two ways.
“Every time you pull down one of them, you pull down one of those meant to control presidential morality,” Mr. Yoo said.
The Guardrails Break Down
The Watergate scandal famously took its name from the June 1972 break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate Hotel by a hapless crew of operatives working to bug the opposition on behalf of Nixon’s re-election campaign. But as the journalist Garrett M. Graff wrote in his 2022 book on the scandal, “‘Watergate’ was less an event than a way of life for the Nixon administration — a mind-set that evolved into a multiyear, multifaceted corruption and erosion of ethics within the office of the president.”
The Vietnam War and cultural clashes of the 1960s had long since heated the country’s political cauldron to a boil when Watergate fully erupted after Nixon’s 1972 landslide re-election.
“Public confidence in all three branches of the federal government has been seriously eroded,” a 1977 Senate report said. Distrust spread everywhere. Two days before Nixon resigned in August 1974, Stevie Wonder released the hit single “You Haven’t Done Nothin’,” with lyrics aimed at the president: “We are sick and tired of hearing your song / Tellin’ how you are gonna change right from wrong.”
Congress woke itself from a slumber. It reasserted its constitutionally granted power over major decisions like approving the use of military force and controlling government spending — two areas Mr. Trump is challenging by withholding funds approved by Congress and by unilaterally bombing boats in the waters off Venezuela.
Then, to address the rampant political corruption at the heart of the scandal, Congress struck a tricky balance. It established roles within the executive branch designed to hold the president to account, and gave them a degree of independence from White House control.
Those guardrails are barely holding.
When a group of fired inspectors general sued over their jobs earlier this year, Ana C. Reyes, a federal judge, said Watergate had revealed the importance of “independent oversight of the executive branch” and that the firings — made without explanation or prior notice to Congress — “raise risk of appearing retaliatory, which can chill IGs’ work.”
In a surprise move, she did not reinstate the inspectors, saying that the president could simply remove them again, by following the law next time. To the fired inspectors, the message from the administration was clear: “They don’t want independent accountability,” said Michael J. Missal, who had served as inspector general at the Department of Veterans Affairs since 2016.
Any Watergate-era creation with a whiff of independence is now suspect.
Take the protections of federal workers from political influence. In the early 1970s, a Nixon aide wrote a secret manual for implanting political loyalists in the federal work force and turning government workers and contracts into tools for Nixon’s re-election campaign.
Once revealed, that secret plan became a trigger for the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978, meant to further protect the government work force from politics and constrain presidential powers to hire and fire.
In both of his terms, Mr. Trump and his aides have been aggressive at expanding his ability to replace more of the federal work force that he derides as the “deep state” aligned against him.
Loyalty is a priority. An administration hiring plan issued in May said its goal is to find “only the most talented, capable and patriotic Americans.” One new essay question asks job applicants to identify one or two of Mr. Trump’s executive orders or priorities “that are significant to you, and explain how you would help implement them if hired.”
One provision of the 1978 law established the Office of Special Counsel, which is charged with protecting federal workers from mistreatment, particularly retaliation against whistle-blowers. To assure independence from presidential control, the Special Counsel serves a mandated five-year term and can only be removed “for inefficiency, neglect of duty or malfeasance in office.”
On Feb. 7, Mr. Trump fired the counsel, Hampton Dellinger, without explanation (although he had partly blamed whistle-blowers for his first impeachment). A federal judge ordered Mr. Dellinger be reinstated and he began investigating the wholesale firing of probationary employees. Then an appeals court ruled the president had the power to remove Mr. Dellinger.
‘A Perversion of Justice’
In justifying the web of controls they were weaving around the presidency, Watergate-era senators invoked a quote from the Federalist Papers: “If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.”
The Saturday Night Massacre made the absence of angels painfully clear. On that night in October 1973, Nixon ordered the firing of Archibald Cox, the special prosecutor investigating Watergate. The Justice Department’s top two officials resigned rather than follow orders. A third complied.
“It was shocking,” said Andrew Rudalevige, a government professor and presidential scholar at Bowdoin College, “that Nixon fired someone for simply looking into his behavior.”
Congress, concluding that the Justice Department couldn’t investigate top government figures, established the role of special prosecutor — an investigator appointed by a panel of judges when an attorney general found it necessary. Since Congress did not reauthorize the special counsel role in 1999, attorneys general have appointed quasi-independent special counsels for politically sensitive cases, like Jack Smith, who investigated Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 defeat. (These Justice Department special counsels are unrelated to the counsels who handle whistle-blowers.)
Nixon’s Justice Department, and particularly John Mitchell, his first attorney general, were deeply entwined in his political corruption. The Justice Department and the F.B.I., along with the I.R.S., were critical to enforcing the “enemies list” plan — described by Nixon’s White House counsel, John Dean, as using “the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies.”
After Nixon, attorneys general sought to re-establish the integrity of the department, partly with “contact” rules to keep the White House from meddling in prosecutions.
As Attorney General Griffin Bell said in a 1978 speech, “in our form of government there are things that are nonpartisan, and one is the law.”
That does not appear to be the vision guiding the current Justice Department.
In March, Attorney General Pam Bondi introduced Mr. Trump for an unusual, rally-style speech to Justice Department employees. “We all work for the greatest president in the history of our country,” she said. A month earlier, she had announced in a memo the department’s Weaponization Working Group, a task force established largely to examine investigations of Mr. Trump and his political allies. Her memo said the department would “provide quarterly reports to the White House regarding the progress of the review.”
In a Truth Social post on Sept. 20 addressed to “Pam,” Mr. Trump ordered the prosecution of prominent people on his own enemies list — James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director; Attorney General Letitia James of New York; and Senator Adam B. Schiff of California, one of his Democratic nemeses in Congress. “They’re all guilty as hell,” he wrote, adding “They impeached me twice, and indicted me (5 times!), OVER NOTHING. JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!”
Department leaders complied, although their attempts to charge Mr. Comey and Ms. James have so far been frustrated by career prosecutors, judges and grand jurors.
“It’s a perversion of the Department of Justice and also a perversion of justice,” said Stuart Gerson, a top Justice Department official in the George H.W. Bush administration and the acting attorney general in the early months of the Clinton administration.
‘I’m Not a Crook’
“In all of my years of public life, I have never profited, never profited from public service,” Nixon declared at a news conference in November 1973. He then offered his iconic defense: “I’m not a crook.”
Questions swirled about Nixon’s taxes and the improvements to his houses made with government money, but what drove him from office was his abuse of presidential power for political, not financial, gain.
Still, when a Senate committee wrote the 1978 Ethics in Government Act, it paid special attention to the corrupting possibilities of financial conflicts of interest.
The law established the Office of Government Ethics to handle newly mandated financial disclosure requirements for government officials and to detect and resolve conflicts of interest. To assure its independence from politics, office directors were appointed with the consent of the Senate to five-year terms, with the intention that they would bridge administrations.
Conflicts of interest in the second Trump administration were an immediate concern among ethics experts given the billionaires and near-billionaires in top jobs, including the president. Chief among them was Elon Musk, the president’s campaign megadonor whose SpaceX company is a major government contractor. Mr. Trump unleashed Mr. Musk to chop government employees, programs and contracts under the banner of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. In early February, Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said that Mr. Musk had complied with appropriate policies, and added that “if Elon Musk comes across a conflict of interest with the contracts and the funding that DOGE is overseeing, then Elon will excuse himself from those contracts.”
Days later, Mr. Trump fired the director of the Office of Government Ethics, David Huitema, who was just months into his term. No reason was given, nor does the law require one. He has been replaced by a succession of three part-time acting directors, all White House political appointees with other major administration jobs.
When asked what safeguards were in place to handle conflicts of interest and the appearance of conflicts, a White House spokeswoman, Taylor Rogers, said the news “media’s continued attempts to fabricate conflicts of interest are irresponsible” and that “the president is and always has been motivated solely by what is best for the American people.”
Meanwhile, the intermingling of Mr. Trump’s businesses and his presidency has accelerated. Last year, he helped start a family crypto business, World Liberty Financial, with the family of his Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff. Once in office, his administration loosened crypto regulations and pulled back on investigations involving crypto businesses.
Changpeng Zhao, the world’s richest crypto executive, represents a trifecta of potential conflicts. The Securities and Exchange Commission dropped legal action against his company in May. The same month, Binance, the company Mr. Zhao founded, participated in a $2 billion transaction using digital currency from World Liberty, which is likely generating tens of millions of dollars for the Trump and Witkoff business. In October, Mr. Trump pardoned Mr. Zhao, who had pleaded guilty in 2023 to money laundering violations.
The family memecoin Mr. Trump introduced just days before his second inauguration is a portal for money to flow from investors foreign and domestic to the president’s own wallet. In April, when Mr. Trump held a dinner (and White House tour) for the top 220 holders of the memecoin, the conservative editorial page of The Wall Street Journal bluntly said it raised “the appearance of a conflict of interest in selling access to the president.”
“The law never anticipated this level of brazen violation of norms, especially with this amount of money involved,” said Mr. Blumenthal, the senator from Connecticut. “We’re talking not just about millions but billions, with investors at risk.”
Mr. Trump has asserted, “The president can’t have a conflict of interest.” A 1980s law exempts the president and vice president from criminal conflict statues, reasoning that they touch so many issues it is difficult to avoid conflicts. But there was an assumption a president would want to act ethically, or at least appear to.
In 1974, Antonin Scalia, then a Justice Department lawyer, wrote a legal opinion saying that while ethical regulations do not legally apply to the president or vice president, “it would obviously be undesirable as a matter of policy to engage in conduct proscribed” by the rules. He added: “Failure to observe these standards will furnish a simple basis for damaging criticism, whether or not they technically apply.”
Presidential Authority or Legal Abandon?
Mr. Rudalevige, the Bowdoin professor and author of “The New Imperial Presidency: Renewing Presidential Power after Watergate,” called Congress’s activism in the years after Nixon’s resignation “a resurgence regime.” A new crop of young legislators elected in 1972, many of them motivated by anger over the Vietnam War, altered Congress’s hidebound seniority rules and also provided a shot of adrenaline to assert congressional power over the presidency as the scandal unfolded.
Then came a surge against the resurgence.
The Watergate-era presidential constraints were vulnerable even before Mr. Trump took office, Mr. Rudalevige said, because enforcing them required Congress to use the powers it had granted itself. yet increasing partisanship made such congressional action unlikely. Bipartisan congressional coalitions have become more rare, and members are less likely to oppose presidents of their own party.
Tension between the power of the president and Congress existed long before Watergate. But in the 1980s, Reagan administration officials, including Mr. Scalia and Attorney General Edwin Meese III, invoked an expansive view of presidential power that became known as the “unitary executive theory.” Over time, it has been widely accepted on the right, including, it appears, among the majority of current Supreme Court justices.
The Trump administration has succinctly laid out the basis of the theory in briefs arguing that the president has the power to remove heads of independent agencies. The briefs assert that the Constitution says that “the ‘executive Power’ — all of it — is ‘vested in a President,’ who must ‘take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.’” Without the “authority to remove those who assist him in carrying out his duties,” Mr. Trump cannot be held “fully accountable for discharging his own responsibilities,” the briefs say, quoting judicial opinions.
But even some Republicans who read the Constitution as envisioning a powerful executive say that Mr. Trump, under the cover of the unitary executive theory, is operating with illegal abandon.
Mr. Gerson, the former acting attorney general, said independent agencies created by Congress needed to maintain their impartiality given Mr. Trump’s “insatiable power hunger.”
Mr. Yoo, the Berkeley law professor and veteran of the George W. Bush Justice Department, is a critic of post-Watergate constraints on the presidency and a proponent of the unitary executive theory.
Yet even he says that the jury is still out on Mr. Trump’s use of power. Perhaps he will be remembered as a modern-day Andrew Jackson, a populist who strengthened the presidency, Mr. Yoo said. “That’s the best end of the story,” he said. “The bad story is that he turns out to be like Nixon.”
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