The committee counsel Samuel Dash announced to the press: “We now know there are records of those meetings. I don’t have to draw the line underneath and add it up.” Nixon, who was in the hospital after having suffered a sharp pain in his chest, instinctively feared how the recordings would make him look. His chief of staff, Alexander Haig, was terrified that the tapes of any president would be destructive.

“Suddenly,” Martin Schram wrote in Newsday, “the Watergate scandal is more than just one man’s word against another’s.” For the first time, it became possible that members of Congress would be able to actually hear the president talking about matters related to Watergate. It would be his words against his own public denials.

The Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward called the tapes a “pivot” in the scandal. Nixon would fight as hard as possible to block access to them for almost a year. He rejected proposals to destroy the tapes before they were subpoenaed by Congress—Vice President Spiro Agnew advised, “Boss, you’ve got to have a bonfire”—based on the belief that executive privilege would be enough to protect them. He still wanted to preserve the material for the historical record. He told Haig the conversations on the tapes would “protect” him. He was wrong.

On July 24, 1974, the Supreme Court ruled 8–0 (Justice William Rehnquist recused himself) that he had to turn over the tapes. Despite an intense investigation that had lasted for over a year and taken place through the tenure of a number of different officials, it was the ability of members of Congress to hear Nixon asking the CIA to stop the FBI investigation that had an impact unlike anything else. It had not actually been clear before then that the constitutional system would work. Fifteen days later, Nixon left office.

Will the Cohen tapes possibly have the same impact? The answer depends in part on what they contain, and on what the public hears. But our political world has changed. Watergate itself generated so much distrust in government that it lowered public expectations of leaders. This is triply true with Trump, whose own loyal supporters seem to understand that he is an extremely flawed man but still love him. Unless there is direct evidence on this or other tapes of his culpability in illegal activity, just hearing Trump discussing untoward, unethical, or even slightly illegal things not rising to the level of impeachment won’t have the same kind of political impact. Indeed, he still survives despite all of the shocking things that he has already said in front of television cameras and on his Twitter feed.

The United States is now so fiercely partisan that shocking tape recordings will still have trouble shaking the political landscape. That congressional Republicans continue to stand by Trump despite his scandalous behavior with Russia has made it clear that almost nothing can overwhelm partisan loyalty. Even if there is a damning tape, the president and his Republican allies in the House would attack the material as fake and illegitimate, part of a “witch hunt.” Unlike Nixon, who fought tooth and nail to prevent the tapes from being released, Trump seems more likely to focus on moving to control the narrative. This has consistently been his preferred strategy with scandal: Get the information out to the public and then control the spin. Nor did President Nixon have Fox News hosts to explain why the tapes don’t prove anything about the president’s wrongdoing. Trump can count on his Fox friends.