Elizabeth Drew is author of Washington Journal: Reporting Watergate and Richard Nixon’s Downfall.

Quite early in the Trump presidency, people asked me, Is this like Watergate? The question came mainly from people who weren’t around at the time. My answer was either, No or Not yet.

Well, the situation just changed, and moved significantly toward what was at the heart of Watergate. Donald Trump’s immediate reaction to the ruling Friday night by a federal judge in Washington state ordering a hold on his immigration plan might have been the prelude to a constitutional collision between the president and the judiciary. It was just such a showdown that led to the end of Richard Nixon’s presidency.


In his first defiant tweet dismissing the court’s decision—which put a temporary halt to the implementation of his executive order imposing a travel ban on citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries—as “ridiculous” and referring to “the opinion of this so-called judge, which essentially takes law-enforcement away from our country,” Trump displayed the same contempt for the federal judiciary in our constitutional system that brought down Nixon.

Watergate has come to mean various things to various people. Some see it as a story about ham-handed burglars hired by the White House who got caught during a break-in of the Democratic National Committee’s offices in the Watergate complex in 1972. Others view it as a criminal conspiracy emanating out of the White House, with burglars and bagmen and CIA-supplied equipment, aimed at guaranteeing Nixon’s 1972 reelection. It was those things, but they could have been resolved in the criminal courts.

At the heart of it, Watergate was a constitutional crisis—whether our form of constitutional government, of checks and balances, would survive. This may sound hyperdramatic now, but it was quite real at the time, and how it would end wasn’t nearly as clear then as it is in retrospect.

Watergate was a time of low comedy and high fear. The stumblebum “plumbers,” a team of Cubans and former CIA impresarios, veterans of the calamitous Bay of Pigs invasion early in John F. Kennedy’s presidency, messed up everything they did. The Watergate break-in, at which they were caught on June 17, 1972, was actually their fourth attempt to get into the DNC offices.: First, they failed to get in—they ended up locked in a closet in the Watergate building; the next time, they got to the door of the DNC offices but discovered they didn’t have a correct lock-breaker; and on the third, barely known attempt, the plumbers did succeed in breaking into the Democrats’ headquarters over Memorial Day weekend, but screwed up a wiretap they were to set and brought back blurry pictures of documents they were supposed to photograph. So John Mitchell, the former attorney general and now the chairman of Nixon’s reelection effort, ordered them to go back in.

The Watergate break-in was actually less serious than another act the burglars had already tried and failed to pull off. They had been sent to steal documents from the office in California of the psychiatrist of Daniel Ellsberg, a former Defense Department analyst who had leaked to the New York Times and the Washington Post the Pentagon Papers, a study of U.S. military policy in Vietnam through the time of Lyndon Johnson’s presidency. Though this didn’t directly affect them, it cast some doubt on the wisdom of the venture.

As it turned out, there were no files in the good doctor’s office, which had been supposedly cased by the Plumbers’ leaders before the raid. (They helpfully took pictures of themselves in front of the office door, and since the camera belonged to the CIA, the pictures offered prosecutors proof that they’d been there.)

Nixon and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, were very worked up over this disclosure. Nixon was determined to track down who else had the papers and aimed to destroy Ellsberg. Destroying his so-called enemies was Nixon’s specialty and it got him in a heap of trouble. Trump, too, has confused his opponents with “enemies,” though as far as is known, it stops there.

Nixon, who knew infinitely more about government than Trump does, understood that the attempt to burgle Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office was a violation of the Fourth Amendment’s stricture against unlawful “searches and seizures” of someone’s private property, and the so-called Watergate coverup orchestrated by the Nixon White House was aimed more at this than the Watergate break-in. Nixon and his chief of staff, H. Robert Haldeman, decided that the burglars’ silence had to be bought, through the solicitation of illicit funds. (It was 18½ minutes of this conversation, shortly after the Watergate burglars were caught, that was erased—by, as it turned out, Nixon.)

There’s no evidence that any such things are going on in the Trump administration; subsequent White House occupants have known better than to do them and until now haven’t been headed by people so consumed with reelection and vengeance. Trump is still learning how to conduct the presidency—presumably, he’s adjusting his methods as a result of a number of goof-ups, and at this time it’s unknown whether he’ll be able to tame his ambitions. Nixon’s chronic seeking of vengeance led to another aspect of Watergate that got him in trouble in the end: the “enemies list” that was the basis for using the instruments of government, such as the IRS, against specified journalists, professors, foundation officers and others whom Nixon saw as out to get him.

Like Nixon, Trump refers to his opponents as “enemies” but we don’t yet know how far he will take that. Or whether there are people around him who will convince him that to go down that road would be a profoundly bad idea. A few of Nixon’s aides knew to not carry out some of his most mad orders—such as firebombing the Brookings Institution to find parts of the Pentagon Papers study that he believed were there. (They weren’t.) So far, Trump’s aides haven’t been able to restrain his compulsion to tweet out grievances and threats.

Presumably Trump, like every president since Nixon, hasn’t reinstituted a taping system. It was the compulsive recording of his Oval Office meetings that got Nixon in so much trouble, as it accumulated the evidence against him. Many have wondered why Nixon didn’t burn the tapes after they became known—the speculative answers range from that he’d been advised he’d be obstructing justice to the fact that he wanted to preserve them for the memoir he’d write after his presidency.

The existence of the Nixon tapes became known in the course of hearings by a special Senate committee to investigate Watergate, headed by Sam Ervin, a shrewdly folksy North Carolinian, and that discovery changed the nature of the story. Inevitably, investigators subpoenaed the tapes, and their demand was upheld by a district and appellate court. Nixon’s refusal to obey the court order that he turn over the tapes to prosecutors brought about the culminating constitutional crisis. On Friday, October 19, 1973, Nixon said he wouldn’t appeal the court order to the Supreme Court, nor would he obey it. At the same time, Nixon ordered the Watergate special prosecutor, Archibald Cox, to cease his efforts to obtain materials from the House.

On a bright, spring-like Saturday, October 20, Cox, a Harvard Law School professor, said in a nationally televised news conference that he couldn’t obey Nixon’s order because it interfered with “institutional arrangements.” Nixon couldn’t fire him, Cox said; that would have to be done by the attorney general, to whom he reported. All of Washington and much of the country waited tensely to see what would happen next. That night, at precisely 8:31, came the news that the attorney general, Elliot Richardson, had resigned rather than agree to a presidential order to fire Cox. Richardson’s deputy, William Ruckelshaus, also resigned rather than fire Cox. Eventually, Robert Bork, the solicitor general, became acting attorney general and fired Cox. FBI agents sealed off the offices of Richardson, Ruckelshaus and Cox. All of this happened on a dark Saturday night; Washington felt like a banana republic. This deeply alarming series of events came to be called “the Saturday night massacre.” Nixon was defying a court order and, it was widely believed, was out of control. Serious talk of impeachment began then.

In recent years, the word impeachment has been thrown around, and the process has been used so casually that it may be hard to understand what an awesome concept it was at that time. No president had been impeached by the House since Andrew Johnson and he was spared conviction by the Senate by one vote. Now, people rushed out to buy a book on the subject. A furious Nixon eventually held a news conference in which he denounced the press. In terms that are not unfamiliar now but were astonishing then, Nixon said, “I have never heard or seen such outrageous, vicious, distorted reporting in my 27 years of public life.”

In time, a new special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski, was named and in July 1974 the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that Nixon had to turn over the tapes. By this time, the House Judiciary Committee had begun its inquiry into whether to impeach Nixon, and his defiance of court orders was one of the major issues it considered. When the transcripts of the tapes were made public, it was clear that our capacity for being shocked hadn’t yet been exhausted. Despite all the [EXPLETIVE DELETED]s Nixon came through as a bigoted, vulgar man—even indelicate members of Congress were taken aback.

But still, there was considerable hesitation to impeach Nixon: It was a grave step that alarmed many members of Congress. Some said they were still looking for the “smoking gun”—in a room full of smoke; they wanted proof that Nixon had done something clearly illegal rather than impeach him for abuse of the office of the presidency, which was the heart of the case against him. In time, a piece of tape that hadn’t been turned over was discovered that revealed that Nixon had ordered the CIA to call the FBI and tell them to stop investigating the president because national security was involved. This was clear obstruction of justice and it helped the more timorous members make up their mind to vote for Nixon’s impeachment. Another reason many, especially Republicans, had hesitated to proceed with impeachment was that Nixon still had a base that had to be considered.

Eventually, with a great deal of honest solemnity, three articles of impeachment were approved on a bipartisan basis by the House Judiciary Committee. The fact that Nixon had defied the courts was the basis of one of them. Another charged him with abuse of power and held him accountable for the misdeeds of his top aides. Nixon’s misuse of government agencies to punish his “enemies” was also a charge against him. This shows that in a serious impeachment process, various misdeeds that amount to a president’s defiance of our constitutional system can come to cause him serious problems. Like Nixon, Trump shows an impatience with boundaries.

In time, Nixon’s base of support began to collapse—there’s nothing permanent about one’s supposed base, even if the most fervent believers stay with a president, as some but not enough did with Nixon. Four Republican congressional leaders went to Nixon to tell him that they couldn’t prevent his being impeached by the full House and convicted in a Senate trial. Their message was unmistakable: Nixon could no longer count on his own party to support him and he should go. Numerous Republican House members didn’t want to cast a vote to impeach Nixon and Republican senators didn’t want to undergo a lengthy Senate trial and be forced to vote on whether to convict him. If their mission was to a significant degree driven by self-interest, that’s what politicians do.

What does all this have to do with now? It makes clear that the basic precept of the Constitution—the separation of powers—is a hallowed principle, and when it’s defied the public can become very aroused. The widespread rage over Trump’s order on immigration stemmed from among other things a sense that another constitutional principle, that government policies aren’t to be based on considerations of religion, was being violated. The patent unconstitutionality of barring people from certain countries because they were predominantly Muslim—oh, yes, that’s right, they were said to be especially dangerous because of home-grown terrorists—and the provision that once the travel ban on those states was lifted, minorities (read: Christians) would be given priority, formed the basis of the ruling of the federal judge in Washington state to stay the program. The judge also found that there’s no factual basis underlying the ban, since there’d been no serious terror attacks on the United States by people from these countries.

While it’s hazardous to predict how the Supreme Court will rule in any given case, it would seem that at least one of the court’s conservatives would find the immigration order unconstitutional and that that overrides the president’s authority to set certain immigration rules.

The crucial question now is how far Trump will take his refusal to accept the authority of the federal courts to overturn his immigration order. If the appellate or Supreme Court ruled against him will they be “so-called” judges, too? Is Trump painting himself into a corner where all that’s left is a constitutional confrontation with the courts? If he stays on this course, that’s where he’s headed. Are there people around him who can dissuade him of the perils he’s inviting upon himself? On Sunday, Trump was still defiantly tweeting his outrage at the Washington state ruling: “Just cannot believe a judge would put our country in such peril,” he wrote. “If something happens blame him and court system. People pouring in. Bad!”

President Trump is about to learn that he can’t bully the federal courts through tweets and insults. Some corporations and individuals may quaver at his thunderbolts, but the branch of government entrusted with acting as a check on the executive and legislative branches and with protecting the Constitution won’t be so easily cowed.