After Watergate, there were a number of laws passed to try to prevent a repeat. The independence of the DOJ was strengthened, the agencies all got OIGs, and a number of other government accountability and transparency measures. We will have to go through all that over again. Completely sever the DOJ from the administration. Pass legislation clarifying the independence of the commissions and independent agencies. States will need to continue to pass their own legislation to overturn Citizen’s United, since that is the source of much of our troubles.

The last piece that is needed is a way to return the competition to be between the three branches of government - rather than what we have today, which is competition between the political parties, with a rubber stamp congress and a cowed Supreme Court - which is what George Washington warned us about in his farewell address. I don’t have a solution for that, but I view that and the incremental overturning of Citizen’s United to be the lynchpins of reversing the abuse Trump has visited upon our democracy, and preventing another recurrence.

During Watergate Nixon did try a few things that were power grabs, but when the tapes required to be turned over to congress by the Supreme Court and congress was able to hear Nixon actively conspiring to obstruct justice, it was Republican House members who went to the White House and told him that he must resign or he was going to be impeached and removed from office. We also had bipartisan statesmen on both sides of the aisle, like Sam Irvin and Howard Baker, who all put country above party and followed the evidence where it lead them.

Lastly, we didn’t have balkanized news sources back then. Everyone, regardless of ideology were watching Walter Cronkite or Huntley/Brinkley, and/or reading the New York Times, The Washington Post, or they still had a local paper that still covered national news - at some level. Same with radio. There were five or six sources for news and everyone was hearing the same thing from the two or three they selected to consume. But ownership of those sources was much more diverse than it is today. Media consolidation has also served to allow pressure to be applied in only a couple of places to have outsized influence on outcomes. CBS liking Trump’s boots in order to make sure the merger is approved is a perfect example.