They’re right about that. Trump’s assertion of the president’s power to pause funding — the right of impoundment — reverses the standard practice of the past two generations. Team Trump aims to restore the traditional exercise of presidential authority to impound congressional spending, a power which was restricted by the Impoundment Control Act of 1974. In doing so, the Trumpians aim to put an end to what political analyst Kevin Phillips called the “Watergate warp” that weakened American presidents, Republican and Democratic, pulling them down from the Caesarist heights summited by pre-Watergate chief executives.

The principle behind impoundments is simple. Congress has the authority to set the ceiling on spending, the thinking runs, but not the floor. If the goal of a program is achieved without spending the full amount authorized by the legislative branch, the president can decide not to spend the difference. So argued FDR, a frequent user of impoundments. Forcing the president to spend every last dime, he said, “would take from the chief executive every incentive for good management and the practice of commonsense economy”.

If the legal battles over Trump’s executive order freezing some spending lead to a Supreme Court decision clarifying the constitutionality of impoundments — and holding the 1974 act unconstitutional — it would be a huge win for the administration, and they are gearing up for it. But legal battles are downstream of political ones. In Trump’s first term, the president was frequently stymied by coordinated media, legal, and security-apparatus efforts to generate public outcry. After some bluster, Trump usually withdrew to a more conventional position. But he is pulling no punches this time around, and noticeably, he doesn’t need to. The American people appear much less susceptible to supposed threats to “our democracy” than they were in 2017, and Trump’s approval ratings have climbed since he re-entered the Oval Office.

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The flashpoint over impoundments reveals a deeper shift in the American political imagination. The key to understanding what’s happening lies the mythical role played by the person to whom the five former Treasury secretaries compared Trump: Richard Nixon, whose downfall took away the vast presidential powers amassed by FDR.

Presidents before FDR had used impoundments. But from FDR to Nixon, impoundments were a major part of a bipartisan consensus. Americans wanted a strong president. In May 1932, FDR asserted that “the country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent experimentation”. In his first Inaugural Address, FDR threatened to rule by decree if Congress failed to back him: “I shall not evade the clear course of duty that will then confront me.”

FDR capitalized on the Great Depression to launch an era in which Americans expected the president to act decisively and master all the resources of the federal government to resolve problems. This expectation remained strong throughout World War II and into the early Sixties. Trust in government, and the president, remained high through the New Deal order. But by the late Sixties, as the war in Vietnam worsened and the excesses of social liberalism disturbed the public, confidence in the executive began to wane.

It was this discontent that catapulted Nixon to the presidency. Campaigning on law and order and against the failed Democratic record, Nixon won the 1968 election as a moderate conservative. He set out to run the federal government along the lines that the FDR had set down with the New Deal. Nixon was the last president to try and govern in Roosevelt’s Caesarist model. It would prove his undoing.

While he supported the New Deal, LBJ’s Great Society, and civil rights for black Americans, Nixon thought that the decades-long trend had been for federal bureaucrats to carve off fiefdoms for themselves, in which they were accountable to no one. His aim was to reassert presidential control over the federal bureaucracy. In his first term, he would focus on the foreign-policy bureaucracy; in his second term, he planned to focus on the domestic bureaucracy. As he put it in his memoirs, his objective was to “break the Eastern stranglehold on the executive branch and the federal government”.

There was a partisan element to Nixon’s actions, revealed by his reference to an “Eastern stranglehold”. To wit, bureaucracies were largely run by East Coast liberals ideologically opposed to him. Yet the real divide wasn’t between liberals and conservatives, but over the role of the bureaucracy in a post-FDR America.

Within the government, Nixon’s most powerful opponents weren’t liberals, but conservatives in the military and security services. From FBI boss J. Edgar Hoover to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, these actors sought to defend their institutional prerogatives and autonomy from presidential oversight. To keep the Vietnam War going on their terms, the Joint Chiefs used media leaks to destabilize Nixon’s withdrawal plans and even spied on the president.

Hoover claimed that “political attempts to hamper and interfere with the federal and other police and prosecuting agents are the real menace”. He countered Nixon’s efforts at intelligence reforms that would have required the FBI to cooperate with other agencies under White House supervision. “Hoover has to be told who is president”, Nixon wrote to his chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, to little apparent effect.

Nixon’s project wasn’t revolutionary. Like his predecessors, he made extensive use of impoundments. Like his predecessors, his solution to administrative problems was to try to centralize power in the White House, bypassing unreliable bureaucrats. Like his predecessors, he appointed outsiders who could bring a fresh perspective and, when necessary, clean house. And like his predecessors, Nixon also authorized quasi-political surveillance.

His practices were ambiguous. On the one hand, it looked like the elected president, the figure who in the American system most closely embodies popular sovereignty, was wresting control of the government from unelected bureaucrats — Caesarism in the positive sense, a popular, regal presidency akin to that of Charles de Gaulle in France. On the other hand, it looked like the troubling apex of the “imperial presidency” that FDR had created — Caesarism in the negative sense, an emperor in waiting.

When Hoover died in 1972, Nixon passed over the FBI’s top lieutenants and appointed government attorney L. Patrick Gray as his replacement. This infuriated FBI Associate Director Mark Felt. A Hoover loyalist, Felt thought that Nixon’s actions were compromising the institutional autonomy of the FBI that Hoover had set up. So when Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein began examining the Watergate burglary, Felt saw an opportunity to undermine the new acting director of the FBI and embarrass the administration that had passed him over for the top job. As historian Beverly Gage has written, “Felt cooperated with Woodward not to preserve the American Constitution or to limit the imperial presidency, as the standard Watergate myths would suggest, but to protect the legacy of J. Edgar Hoover”.

Nixon’s attempt to reassert presidential power set off a political conflict against a partisan Congress and, more important, bureaucrats jealous of their own institutional expertise. Public opinion turned against Nixon, aided by media outlets united in their hostility; back then, there were only three national television stations, which all agreed to coordinate their programming so that at least one was always broadcasting the Senate hearings on Watergate.

Nixon became a scapegoat, taking the fall for decades of executive-branch and intelligence-agency abuses. As a matter of public opinion, his downfall was possibly inevitable. The American public was exhausted with the Vietnam War, with the dirty tricks of their politicians and spies, and with runaway inflation, especially at the gas pump. Somebody had to pay, and Nixon, who had been at the top of American politics since the 1950s, fit the bill.

When the Erwin Committee issued its report on Nixon’s wrongdoing in June 1974, it said less about Watergate than about a culture of executive abuse of power. “From the early days of the present administration”, the introduction went, “the power of the president was viewed by some in the White House as almost without limit”. Presidential power had become outré. One month after the report’s release, a critically weakened Nixon signed the Impoundment Control Act. It didn’t save him. In August 1974, he resigned to avoid impeachment. His successor, Gerald Ford, pardoned him, hoping that this would bring an end to America’s “long national nightmare”.

By the early Eighties, the passions of Watergate subsided; many thought the country had moved on. Kevin Phillips, the political consultant-turned-writer and analyst, wasn’t so sure. Hence, his coinage of “the Watergate warp” to describe how Nixon’s disgrace might continue to reshape American politics.

The first way it did so was to help conservatives. Liberals hoped that Watergate would poison the GOP brand for a generation. Yet the scandal couldn’t be wielded along partisan lines. Across the board, the warp reinforced Americans’ suspicion of their government. The American electorate tilted toward the ideology that manifested that suspicion, giving conservative Republicans control of the White House until 1992, and control of Congress shortly after that.

But the Watergate warp didn’t bring about conservative small government. It merely led to a weaker president. This was the second way it distorted American politics. The Seventies saw the explosion of the powers of the administrative state. The New Deal’s “economic regulation” of the banking and commercial sectors transformed into “social regulation” affecting most of American life. Anxious to dodge the “imperial” accusation, presidents acquiesced to legislation that took decision-making out of the White House and handed it over to administrative agencies.

Watergate the break-in was a petty political burglary; Watergate the myth was an act of robbery. It stole power from the president and distributed it to faceless and unaccountable bureaucrats. The Watergate warp was the destruction of Rooseveltian presidential power by a mean and hungry legal and media elite. And therein lay its third, most tedious disfiguration. Watergate became the founding myth for journalists, judges, and lawyers who dreamed of orchestrating investigative reports and special prosecutions that would topple presidents. It turned political and media elites into aspiring regicides, each fancying himself a Cassius taking down Caesar.

The result has been that every few years, Americans are subjected to scandals narrated along Watergate lines: Iran-Contra, Whitewater, the Valerie Plame affair, and “Russian collusion” all followed a familiar path of public inquiry, a push for a special prosecutor, and then incessant questions about what the president knew and when he knew it. Their supporters, Left and Right, saw themselves vindicating the rule of law; to their critics, they looked like lawfare designed to undo the democratic will.

Over the past decade, we’ve seen signs that the Watergate warp is fading. For starters, the lawfare strategy hasn’t been all that successful since Nixon. The closest that America has come to a repeat of the Watergate saga was with #Russiagate during Trump’s first term. Special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe was supposed to follow the Watergate script. Indeed, in 2018, it inspired a court petition to unseal grand-jury documents — normally sealed forever — from the Watergate Special Prosecution Task Force. The hope was that this might provide some readily applicable lessons. The judge granted the request, but it didn’t help. The Mueller probe missed its target, concluding that there had been no collusion between Team Trump and the Kremlin during the 2016 campaign.

L’affaire collusion also failed to reshape public opinion. Scapegoating is a collective endeavor, and unlike in Watergate, Mueller couldn’t even convince half the country. Trump’s opponents tried again with the Jan. 6 Commission; like the Mueller investigation, it was a well-organized operation, a made-for-TV drama. Each such effort failed for precisely that reason. They were designed to replicate the homogeneous media environment of the Seventies, which no longer exists. To work, scapegoating demands that the collective doesn’t perceive a victim. As soon as they see one, the mechanism falls apart. Trump I’s failed scapegoating led to Trump II’s victory over Kamala Harris.

In retrospect, it is revealing how much of the Biden presidency and Harris campaign were devoted to warning that Trump was a dictator-in-waiting because he wanted to fire the bureaucrats. This strategy was only marginally effective: the only demographic that the Democrats gained ground with between 2020 and 2024 was voters over age 65. But younger voters admire Trump for precisely the reason that the Watergate generation fears him: his dynamism, his determination to achieve results.

Then, too, the Left’s glorification of the bureaucracy has often been revealed to be a fig leaf covering an inept federal workforce. Paeans to the unimpeachable authority of the civil service are amusing at the best of times, but become less funny when their failures are obvious to millions. Progressives quietly acknowledge the need to circumvent lethargic agencies; after all, the precedent for Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency stems from Obama’s struggles with bureaucratic incompetence. In 2014, because of the failures around the rollout of ObamaCare and the website healthcare.gov, Obama set up the US Digital Service, with 300 staffers drawn mainly from Silicon Valley. Its head was a political appointee, not a civil servant.

What progressives admit in private, Trump bellowed across the land. In 2024, the desire to fix a dysfunctional state apparatus overcame older Americans’ anxieties about the imperial presidency. Victorious, Trump rechristened the US Digital Service as DOGE, giving him an entity that could operate throughout the whole federal government with personnel selected free of normal civil-service channels.

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Nixon is having his revenge. The Supreme Court’s ruling last year asserting broad presidential immunity is a kind of posthumous vindication of Nixon’s presidential defense; had the ruling been issued in 1973, it would have shipwrecked the Watergate special prosecution. The high court read the law — and the national mood — correctly. Voters don’t want lawfare to harass former presidents, nor to paralyze presidents in office. They do want an effective and decisive executive. The model of personal power that presidents from FDR to Nixon embodied is back in style.

This changes the terms of American politics. Back in the Seventies, Nixon realized that the fundamental political conflict facing America was not that between liberals and conservatives, but between those who wanted the bureaucracies to exercise institutional autonomy and those who wanted them subordinated to the elected officials. That remains true today. Trump’s most controversial Cabinet picks (RFK, Tulsi Gabbard, Kash Patel, and Pete Hegseth) had liberal critics, but particularly vehement conservative ones. This was because they swore to take back control of entrenched scientific, intelligence, or military bureaucracies. Just like liberals, conservatives have their favorite bureaucracies.

This was why movement conservatism was never at peace with Nixon, and why it will likely never be at peace with Trump. The electoral appetite is for restoring competence and efficiency in government, as well as purging the state apparatus of ideological absurdities. It doesn’t exist to realize movement conservatism’s visions of a small, shrunken government.

Finally, if the resurgence of American Caesarism is “red” and Nixonian at the moment, another “blue” Caesar is certainly possible in a country that remains so narrowly divided. Caesarism isn’t the product of a stable constitutional system; it is always a volatile phenomenon, its trajectory is difficult to predict or control. The Roman emperors were great not because of their steady hand, but because they went further than anyone else in good or evil.

So far, Trump’s impact lies with demolition, not creation. Whatever the future holds, he has brought an end to a lingering national myth. The elite obsession with Nixon, as it appears in op-eds and lawfare, has never been less effective. For decades, the Watergate script was endlessly rerun and rebooted. But Trump has pulled the plug.

That got my attention. At the time, I was a member of the White House staff. I ate lunch almost every day in the White House Mess with Chief of Staff Bob Haldeman, Deputy Chief of Staff John Erlichman, and a crowd of other political aides. I wondered if any of them were involved in this very strange political espionage operation.

Fortunately, my presidential appointment had nothing to do with domestic politics. Along with receiving a White House pass, I had been confirmed by the Senate as an ambassador and in practice was working as the president’s chief trade negotiator. Although I carried a diplomatic passport issued by the State Department, Nixon distrusted State. He often used me as his personal representative for sensitive discussions with foreign leaders and officials.

I had served Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson in several posts since 1962 and had decided, when Nixon was elected, to leave my assignment in the Office of the US Trade Representative. But shortly after Nixon was sworn in, a stranger wandered into my office, whom I soon discovered had been sent by the White House personnel office.

The stranger said his name was Murray Chotiner and that he had been Nixon’s campaign manager in California and during his first run for president in 1960. Murray said Nixon had originally planned to give him a presidential appointment after entering office, but the press had characterised him as Nixon’s “dirty tricks manager”, making Senate confirmation problematic. So he was assigned as general counsel in the USTR.

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Murray said he had been advised by several members of Congress that I was the best informed official on political and trade disputes with European nations. Could he accompany me on my visits to foreign capitals?  I told him I was planning to resign but would stay three months to bring the incoming Nixon team up to speed. Murray travelled with me for about 10 weeks. After a while we became travel buddies, and I came to like his humour and deep insights into politics.

Two years later, in mid-1971, Murray called me to ask if I would be willing to be a consultant to Nixon on international issues, and I agreed. At the start of 1972, Murray called again and said “the President needs you”. I agreed to join his staff full-time and my name was sent to the Senate for confirmation. When I met the president alone, he said he had several international tasks in mind that would likely be subject to political controversy in Washington. When I needed his approval for my decisions or initiatives, he said I could bypass the Haldeman bureaucracy and just tell Murray, who would notify him. “Just don’t tell anyone you have direct access to POTUS.”

In the early days in my new post, Murray took me aside, “Be careful when you speak in or near the Oval Office”, he said. “Recording devices are keeping records of everything said.” This was Haldeman’s idea. A control freak, he wanted to know whatever Nixon was saying or doing with other visitors whenever Haldeman was not present. Murray said he had warned the president that the recordings were a bad idea that would bite him eventually, but Nixon shrugged it off.

As the months rolled on and the Watergate scandal broadened, more and more White House officials and Cabinet officials seemed to be caught covering up inappropriate or even illegal actions.

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During this turmoil, I was busy doing my own job. In 1973, for example, Nixon and French President Georges Pompidou agree to hold a Summit in Reyjavik, Iceland, to address US-French tension following Nixon’s 1971 decision to abandon the gold standard. Nixon asked me to accompany him alongside Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, Treasury Secretary George Shultz, Treasury Undersecretary, Paul Volcker, and other key officials. A special side meeting had been planned for Shultz, Volcker and I to speak with French Finance Minister Giscard d’Estaing. To my surprise, Nixon asked me to do the talking. Later, Shultz explained that Giscard deeply disliked Volcker but seemed to respect me.

When Kissinger and Shultz scheduled a trip to Moscow to meet with Leonid Brezhnev and other high Soviet officials, Nixon asked me to tag along. He also asked me to go to London to assist the Prime Minister’s Cabinet Office in their negotiating UK joining the European Common Market in 1973. After Kissinger laid out a new Pacific security policy framework known as the “Guam Doctrine”, Nixon suggested I go to Canberra and Tokyo to begin dialogue on a potential US economic arrangement with Asia-Pacific nations, which I did.

During 1974, most of my time was spent shepherding Senate approval of the Trade Act of 1974. During this period of Congressional bargaining, Nixon gave me personal authority to sign off with Senate leadership the final drafts of that historic law.

As I was busy doing my job, I saw a building series of actions and cover-ups among the political appointees, resulting in the resignation of the Attorney General, and then successor Attorney Generals and their appointees. A Senate Committee was finally established to investigate the question: was Nixon personally involved in the cover-up? As Senator Howard Baker asked, “What did the President know, and when did he know it?”

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It turned out that the president knew a lot. On 16 July, 1973, one of Nixon’s aides, Alexander Butterfield, revealed the existence of the White House taping system in a televised interview, elevating the scandal from a curiosity to a national obsession. Senate investigators demanded the tapes; Nixon resisted, prevaricated, and dragged his feet, but eventually, in 1974, the Supreme Court ruled that the president had to make them available, and he complied. It then became clear that Nixon had long been complicit in the elaborate cover-up. Given the choice of impeachment or resignation, Nixon resigned in order to avoid further damage to the institution of the presidency.

Looking back, I saw catastrophic damage done to a president by a bunch of inept thugs bent on undermining his political adversaries. Sadly, I could not ask Murray for his opinion because he had been killed in a car crash in 1973. I thought Nixon should have fired everyone involved in the Watergate break-in as soon as the illegal raid on the DNC came to light. I remembered Murray’s warning to me that the White House recording system would come back to bite the president someday.

In some sense, history has been unkind to Nixon. Recently, Watergate has been compared to the raid on the US Capitol on 6 January, 2021, no doubt because both involved a presidential scandal followed by high-profile Congressional hearings. But Nixon was no Trump. His decision to cover up the break-in was a regrettable lapse in judgment, but when confronted with evidence that he was personally involved, Nixon chose his country over himself, resigning to avoid the impeachment of a sitting president. Trump, by contrast, sought to overturn a national election, and at no point since has he been willing to admit responsibility or even acknowledge reality.

In my experience, Nixon was an excellent foreign-policy president. He was actively involved in foreign policy and demonstrated more strategic thinking in this regard than most of his successors, even pulling off a handful of impressive diplomatic coups. His domestic policy decisions, on the other hand, were often questionable. But in that — going by the record of America’s more recent presidents — Richard Nixon was hardly alone.

Shortly after midnight on 17 June, 1972, a security guard at the Watergate Complex noticed that someone had taped over several door locks in the main office building and alerted the police, who arrested five men for breaking into the offices of the Democratic National Committee on the sixth floor. On 6 August, after the intruders were tied to President Richard Nixon’s re-election campaign, the Washington Post combined the words “Watergate” and “scandal” for the very first time.

Fifty years on, Watergate remains the political scandal, at least etymologically. Illegal parties at Downing Street? Partygate. A beer in Keir Starmer’s hand at a possibly illegal gathering? Beergate. The people who started a harassment campaign against women in the games industry in 2014 called it Gamergate, and that wasn’t even a real scandal. Even some countries where English is not the first language use the suffix. I suppose the sense of something opening, a threshold being crossed, is somewhat apt, but that’s not the reason why it is used. The man who started slapping -gate onto every potential scandal almost straight away was William Safire, a conservative columnist for the New York Times and former speechwriter for Nixon. Not all of Safire’s coinages stuck, and most are forgotten, but the format endured.

Safire later admitted that he might have been trying to minimise his former boss’s crimes, making Watergate just the first -gate of many. If that was the case, then he didn’t succeed. Watergate is the king of scandals for a couple of reasons. First, it epitomises the power of diligent journalists to bring high-level malfeasance to light. Played by Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman in the 1976 movie, All the President’s Men, the Washington Post’s dynamic duo of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein are still synonymous with dogged, shoe-leather reporting while Deep Throat (“Follow the money”) is the quintessential informant. Woodward and Bernstein were only part of the story but they gave it a halo of heroism. Second, the scandal had a satisfying conclusion: Nixon resigned in disgrace on the brink of impeachment on August 8 1974. Jimmy Breslin called his bestselling book about the scandal How the Good Guys Finally Won.

Watergate inspires nostalgia for a time when political crimes led to punishment. When Boris Johnson can ride out Partygate (for now) and Donald Trump can survive two impeachments thanks to partisan loyalty, Nixon’s downfall seems refreshingly decisive: truth prevailed and justice was served. Like all historical events, it took on an aura of inevitability after the fact. But the chain of cause and effect was not that simple.

The Washington Post’s first mention of the Watergate scandal, in August 1972, came in the context of despair. During Nixon’s re-election campaign, the paper complained: “Such potentially explosive issues as the Watergate scandal go by almost unremarked.” At that point, it had already been reported that the men who had broken into the DNC offices to plant listening bugs had received money from the Committee to Re-elect the President and that Martha Mitchell, wife of the committee’s director John Mitchell, had been held captive in the California hotel to stop her talking to the press. (Her story is the focus of the new Julia Roberts miniseries Gaslit.) A month before the election, Woodward and Bernstein reported that the FBI believed the break-in “stemmed from a massive campaign of political spying and sabotage on behalf of President Nixon’s re-election”. Nonetheless, Nixon went on to defeat Democrat George McGovern in a 49-state landslide with more than 60% of the popular vote, the killer irony being that none of the skulduggery was necessary.

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Strange though it seems, at the time, most journalists thought that Watergate was just an amusing caper which cast no shadow on a popular president who was scoring diplomatic coups in Russia and China. Few newspapers bothered to assign full-time reporters to the Watergate beat. On television, only CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite picked up the story. Throughout 1972, Woodward and Bernstein were too far ahead of the media pack, which made Watergate look like the Post’s hobby horse. Nixon’s campaign manager Clark MacGregor accused the paper of using “innuendo, third-person hearsay, unsubstantiated charges, anonymous sources, and huge scare headlines” to cook up a non-existent connection between the White House and Watergate on behalf of the McGovern campaign.

Not until the televised Senate hearings began in May 1973 did Watergate become a national obsession, inspiring comedy albums and novelty gifts such as the “jigsaw puzzle that will bug you”. Around 85% of viewers tuned in at some point. Amazingly, Nixon’s vice president Spiro Agnew was soon under investigation himself on unrelated charges of criminal conspiracy, bribery, extortion, and tax fraud. This shocking scandal, leading to his resignation in October, was a mere sideshow to Watergate.

In a scandal, the best defence is confusion. Nixon and allies such as Ronald Reagan shuffled through the full deck of excuses and decoys. It wasn’t a big deal. It was just a few bad apples. It’s a partisan attack by Democrats in cahoots with the liberal media, a witch hunt, a lynch mob. It’s hurting the country. “For America’s sake, let’s get on with the business of government,” said Reagan. In short, move on.

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Having first covered up his complicity in the original crime, Nixon then attempted to cover up the cover-up, and that was the real turning point for public opinion. The administration’s attempt to undermine the Senate investigation let slip the existence of a secret recording system in the Oval Office. Nixon then spent months fighting to block the release of the tapes.

On 20 October 1973, he ordered his attorney general Elliot Richardson to sack the staunchly liberal special prosecutor Archibald Cox, who was demanding that the White House hand over the tapes from the Oval Office’s secret recording system. Richardson refused and resigned. His deputy also refused and resigned. The third in line did sack Cox but this “Saturday Night Massacre” was a colossal miscalculation. Only then did the number of Americans who wanted him to resign finally overtake those who approved of his performance. Even if they didn’t understand exactly what he’d done wrong, they could see that he was acting like he’d done something wrong. Congress took the first step towards impeachment proceedings.

Despite all of that, one in four Americans continued to have Nixon’s back, even after the “smoking gun” tape revealed that the President had been involved in the cover-up since the beginning and triggered his resignation. Nixon and Agnew had energetically stoked white rage and resentment, and that was a faithful constituency. Nixon refused to quit until a posse of Republican greybeards sat him down and told him he was done, 26 months after the break-in.

As Leon Neyfakh’s brilliant 2017 podcast Slow Burn (the source material for Gaslit) argues, it could have turned out very differently. What if Nixon had destroyed the tapes, or there had been no recordings in the first place? What if the Democrats hadn’t held a majority in both houses of Congress? What if partisan polarisation had been as extreme then as it is now? What if influential news outlets had maintained throughout that it was all a smear campaign and reduced the scandal to a political litmus test? Much depended on the integrity of key officials. Elliot Richardson’s loyalty to the administration did not dissuade him from approving the investigations into Nixon and Agnew, even at the cost of his job. John Dean, White House counsel and Watergate conspirator, chose to collaborate with federal prosecutors. The FBI did its job. None of this was guaranteed.

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Yet for all the might-have-beens, Nixon did fall in the end. If it took an awful lot to bring down an election-winning heavyweight in 1974, then it’s even harder now, although it’s worth saying that the UK is in a better place than the US. Johnson may still be in office but a majority of voters, and 148 of his own MPs, want him to resign over Partygate. In Washington, meanwhile, only one Republican Senator voted against Trump during his first impeachment and only seven in the second. Even after the storming of the Capitol, his approval rating stood at 34%. Despite the damning findings of the House’s January 6 committee, Trump is still expected to run again in 2024 and may well win. When one Nixon loyalist was asked in August 1974 if new facts such as the smoking gun tape would change his mind, he replied: “Don’t confuse me with the facts.” During the Trump years that would made him a typical Republican.

Perhaps this failure to punish an attempt to overturn an election is a long-term consequence of Watergate. In 1964, 75% of Americans said that they trusted their government to do the right thing most or all of the time; in 1974, after a decade of gradual decline, it plunged to just 36%. It is currently 21% and has only once achieved a majority, immediately after 9/11. By cratering voters’ faith in politicians in general, Watergate bred a pervasive cynicism which took the air out of most subsequent scandals and explains why so many -gates have fizzled out without inspiring high-level resignations or prosecutions. If you think they’re all as bad as each other, then even egregious wrongdoing can seem like filthy business as usual, to the benefit of the worst offenders.

Thus the most paranoid of presidents gave birth to an age of national paranoia. Immediately after Watergate, this suspicion was dramatised by movies such as The Parallax View and Three Days of the Condor in which the truth either doesn’t come out or, worse, doesn’t matter. In All the President’s Men, Robert Redford plays a role in changing history. At the end of Three Days of the Condor, his CIA researcher, Turner, boasts to a senior official, Higgins, that he has told the New York Times all about a rogue operation and the murders the agency committed to cover it up. But as he walks away, Higgins shouts after him: “Hey Turner! How do you know they’ll print it?” Redford’s face says it all.

If the movie were remade now, I think the question would be even more cynical: sure, they’ll print it, but how do you know it will make any difference? How do you know enough people will care?