I was frightened during Watergate, but I wasn’t this frightened. I saw Watergate as a constitutional crisis, more serious than the widespread notion that Nixon had behaved like a common crook. This narrow view of Watergate was dispelled by the House Judiciary Committee in 1974, which found Nixon guilty of having committed three kinds of offenses against the Constitution, in three Articles of Impeachment. Nixon, of course, resigned from the presidency to escape being driven from it by the Congress. What scared so many of us during Watergate was that the president seemed out of control and that we knew he was using federal agencies to spy upon or harass people he considered his “enemies.” (Nixon confused opponents with enemies.) We nervously joked about whether we were being wiretapped; and we laughed a lot about so many absurdities, including mistakes made by his ham-handed goon squad of “plumbers” and Nixon’s awkward moves to justify his behavior (“I am not a crook”). The most serious act he took to inhibit the congressional investigation was to refuse to deliver papers the Congress had said it needed (this was the subject of one of the Articles of Impeachment). Nixon was a combination of the threatening and the weird. But he observed most of the boundaries.

We’re someplace quite different now. The threat is less personal but more global in its implications. The president is claiming powers that are clearly extra-constitutional. Though Nixon resisted turning over the famous tapes to the special prosecutor, in the end he obeyed a Supreme Court order to do so. The strange and alarming letters from President Trump’s legal team to special counsel Robert Mueller, which The New York Times revealed last weekend, claiming extra-constitutional powers for the president suggests that we’re in for more and possibly rougher legal and political fights ahead. But the real worry is that the goalposts have already been moved; that heretofore unthinkable presidential powers are being claimed by the president and his attorneys; that previously off-limits actions that have already been taken might just be the warm-up. That until this thing is over, one way or another, a lot of damage will have been done to people and to precedents.

More careers could be wrecked along the way; others will simply have been put through hell on a president’s whim. As for precedents, Trump has already bullied the Justice Department, in particular Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, into sharing certain highly sensitive information in an ongoing prosecution with the president’s political allies on Capitol Hill. No one should have questioned for a nanosecond that this sensitive information would go straight to the White House, anyway. (In fact, White House Chief of Staff John Kelly and a White House lawyer even showed up at the supposedly highly sensitive meeting on Capitol Hill where the information was to be divulged to the president’s partisans; they made opening comments expressing the president’s interest in “openness” and then departed, but Democrats and some other legal experts were furious at what they said was White House interference in a meeting they had no business being involved with at all.)

There’s little reason to doubt that someday the House Republicans or the president will push for more information from Rosenstein, trying once more to corner him or perhaps even forcing his ouster. And, should Trump decide he’s trapped and has no choice but to go that far, this would clear the way for the president to cause the firing of Mueller. A lot of people are looking for the equivalent of the “Saturday night massacre,” when Nixon caused the firing of special prosecutor Archibald Cox. It was widely seen as the turning point in the Watergate episode. In Trump’s case, I would posit that a slow-rolling massacre has already begun.

In the case of Nixon those who were alarmed by his actions could find some solace in the fact that his party didn’t control the Congress and that several Republicans were possibly open to the arguments that he should be impeached and forced to leave office. We have no such safeguards now. In what’s supposed to be a separate but equal branch of the government, nearly all of the president’s party are at the least loath to criticize his more outrageous comments and actions. One important question that’s barely been raised, except by Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, is this: to what extent might the group of highly conservative Trump supporters in the House who’ve been acting in Trump’s defense have (pardon the term) colluded with the White House in sharing information and attempting (with real success) to block a genuine inquiry on that side of the Congress.