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

President Donald Trump’s astonishing firing of FBI director James Comey on Tuesday afternoon raised throughout Washington the inevitable question: Is this Watergate? While Watergate was sui generis and is likely to remain so, Trump’s metastasizing crisis, and Washington’s reaction to it, make for a discomfiting reminder of that period. And suddenly it seems increasingly possible it could end the same way.

As it did during Watergate, in the spreading Trump scandal, all of Washington fixates on the latest development, virtually to the exclusion of what had preoccupied five minutes earlier. Thus the firing of Comey, for the moment at least, displaced the city’s and the national media’s obsession since as long as the day before with the question of it took so long for Trump to fire Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, his national security adviser, after the acting attorney general at the time, Sally Yates, informed the White House counsel that Flynn had been compromised by Russia.


As the stunning news of Comey’s firing spread through Washington on Tuesday evening, the reactions were similar to those when a previous president fired his chief investigator: astonishment, a kind of ghoulish humor, plus deep unease at a president behaving so far outside of traditional norms. The fear that permeated the Washington atmosphere during Watergate hasn’t quite developed, but some of the elements of the story—in particular, a vindictive president seeming out of control—are in place for that to happen as well.

Like Richard Nixon, Trump has a propensity for ridding himself of those who presented a threat to him. Nixon’s elimination of special prosecutor Archibald Cox, even if he had to fire a couple of attorneys general until he got to a Justice Department official, Robert Bork, who would carry out the deed, was the point at which the word “impeachment” began to be on people’s lips. Until then the idea was too outsized and even alarming to consider. No president had ever been removed from office by the constitutionally designated congressional act of impeaching (the House) and convicting (the Senate) a president. (Until Newt Gingrich employed impeachment frivolously against Bill Clinton, the term inspired awe.) Cox was demanding that Nixon turn over the tape recordings of his Oval Office conversations, which Nixon was – understandingly, as it turned out – of no mind to do. Comey was seeking information possibly at least as damning, and perhaps worse. We can get too used to a question until it returns in full force: What if the president, or his close associates, colluded with a hostile foreign power to win the office?

If, as it appears, Trump fired Comey because he was investigating two very dangerous matters— possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia’s effort to tilt the presidential election in Trump’s favor, and whether Trump had had business or other dealings that obligated him to Kremlin leader Vladimir Putin—he bought himself a heap of trouble.

The pretense that he fired Comey over his epic mishandling of Hillary Clinton’s private email server was just that—another Trump fish story that he might have thought that his followers, at least, would swallow. Firing his chief investigator could well amount to obstruction of justice, one of the offenses for which Nixon was on the verge of being removed from office when he resigned instead. (That’s the problem with cover-ups; they tend not to work and they only get the perpetrator in more trouble.)

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Yates, whom Trump fired at the end of January, ostensibly for refusing to defend Trump’s benighted first travel ban, also presented a threat to Trump. After she testified before a Senate subcommittee on Monday of this week, it seemed possible that Yates’s firing was also based on other grievances on the president’s part. After all, in bringing to the White House the highly discomfiting charge that Flynn had been compromised by Russia— and then lied to the vice president about it—she pushed a step closer to Trump the possible answer to the dangerous question: Why was he so oddly solicitous toward Putin?

Though Cox’s dismissal was expected once the special prosecutor announced on Saturday, October 30, 1973, that he wouldn’t obey Nixon’s order that he cease trying to obtain the tapes, the execution of it seemed irrational and frightening. It felt like we were living in a banana republic. Trump’s utterly unexpected firing of Comey felt similar. Was the president losing his grip? Had he now gone too far to survive in office? What was so important that he took an action so extreme and also possibly fatal to his presidency?

Even before he fired Comey, Trump was taking on the Watergate-like aspect of the beleaguered president. Charges and not groundless suspicions were coming in from various directions and the leader of the world’s most powerful country seemed to be striking out in various directions, flailing—issuing bizarre statements or having them issued on his behalf, serially ridding himself of turbulent priests. Just the previous day, Trump tweeted no less than six times about Yates and James Clapper, the former intelligence chief who also testified during Monday’s hearing.

Yates put front and center the question of what took him so long—nearly two weeks—to get rid of Flynn after she’d warned the White House that he could be blackmailed for misleading Vice President Mike Pence, and put on the record her interactions with White House Counsel Don McGahn, who dismissively asked her why the Department of Justice would care if White House aides were lying to one another.

For what it’s worth, I don’t find the answer to the question of why it took so long to fire Flynn very elusive: Trump didn’t want to fire him. And so he didn’t do so until word of Yates’ warning appeared in the press. Trump’s extravagant praising of his ousted national security adviser may have seemed odd under the circumstances—in a press conference on February 15, two days after firing Flynn, Trump called him “a wonderful man,” and even on Tuesday White House spokesman Sean Spicer was calling Flynn “a good man.” These comments had the air of coming from someone who feared that Flynn would let drop something he had on him. After all, Flynn was his chief foreign policy adviser and he had had numerous questionable dealings with Russia, including talking to the ambassador about the sanctions that the Obama administration had just imposed in retaliation for Russia’s hacking during the election campaign. When Flynn asked for immunity in exchange for testifying before congressional committees looking into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia Trump made a show of encouraging him—lest we think that such a prospect perturbed him. And, as it happened, shortly before Comey was fired, CNN reported, subpoenas were issued against some of Flynn’s former business partners. The idea that Flynn has something on Trump—just as Putin may—is the most logical explanation as to why the president was reluctant to cut him loose or get on his bad side.

Russia is the thread binding together these seemingly disparate events. The president has been noticeably agitated whenever the subject comes up Russia is a “fake” story, he tweeted on Monday, and, following Yates’ testimony, a “total hoax.” And it turns out that Trump has just hired a Washington law firm to send a letter to the Senate Judiciary subcommittee, which held Monday’s hearing, stating that he has no connections with Russia. Trump was responding to subcommittee chairman Lindsey Graham’s statement that he wants to examine Trump’s business dealings with Russia—the existence of which was hinted at during Clapper’s testimony.

Trump has said a riot of things about his connections with Russia and Putin, or lack thereof: For a time in the past he insisted he’d never phoned Russia—whatever that was supposed to mean; that he’d met Putin, that he hadn’t met him; that “When I went to Russia with the Miss Universe pageant, [Putin] contacted me and was so nice. I mean, the Russian people were so fantastic to us.” He claimed he’d met Putin during a joint appearance on “60 Minutes”—until it was revealed that each had been in his own country at the time.

A statement by his son Eric years before was largely overlooked until the younger Trump son denied it on the morning that Yates was to testify: A golf writer had quoted Eric as telling him in 2014, about funding for the Trump family company’s various golf courses, "We don’t rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need out of Russia." Donald Trump, Jr. more famously said a few years ago, “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross section of a lot of our assets." In the past, Donald Sr. had bragged of his connections with Russian oligarchs: In Moscow in 2013, he addressed a group of potential investors and later boasted, “I have a great relationship with many Russians, and almost all of the oligarchs were in the room.”

USA Today has written that the wealthy Russians Trump dealt with included numerous figures with ties to organized crime. Russians have purchased a large number of condos in New York’s Trump Tower. In February of this year, Trump told reporters, “I have no dealings with Russia. I have no deals that could happen in Russia, because we’ve stayed away. And I have no loans with Russia. I have no loans with Russia at all.” Trump’s chronically loose relationship with the truth doesn’t always get him in trouble, but when it comes to his dealings—or, as he now claims, lack thereof—with Russia, his various versions of reality could be far more than troublesome to his presidency.

While Trump’s firing of Comey had an air of impulsivity, according to reports from Politico’s Josh Dawsey and others, though it was known to a very few, Trump had been considering the move for a week. But clearly the White House was little prepared for the angry and somewhat bipartisan reaction to it. And here, too, is another parallel to Watergate: Nixon had wanted to get rid of Cox and had raged privately about him to aides, furious that the special prosecutor was beyond his control. Trump was reportedly infuriated by Comey’s publicly confirmation of the FBI’s investigation into his campaign’s possible collusion with Russia and he was also known to be angry, that Comey wouldn’t support his charge that Obama had had him wiretapped—a charge of Trump’s invention. As in the case of Watergate, the inconceivable keeps becoming actual.

The Trump people aren’t very original. A few hours after Comey was fired, White House spokesperson Sarah Huckabee Sanders said on Fox News that the press hadn’t paid enough attention to the Trump administration’s achievements while it was paying too much to the investigations into Trump and Russia. “It’s been going on for a year,” she said. “There’s nothing there… it’s time to move on.” In a press conference in September of 1973, Nixon chastised the media for paying more attention to Watergate than to his administration’s accomplishments. In his State of the Union address in 1974, he said, “One year of Watergate is enough.” Meanwhile, Nixon officials urged the press to stop “wallowing in Watergate.”

Nixon was a much more intelligent man than Trump, but both men made a fateful mistake: They grossly underestimated the public reaction when they took desperate measures to remain in power. The one thing we can be sure of thus far is that Trump has intensified the already strong bipartisan concern, spoken and unspoken, about his holding an office that many don’t think he is fit to hold, even if the demands of party politics prevents Republicans from saying so in public. How fateful Comey’s firing is for Trump we cannot yet know, though we do know what happened to Nixon. Whatever the details—however it might come about—by his own actions, Trump has increased the possibility that his presidency might meet the same fate.