As the campaign to impeach and remove President Trump has intensified, so have the defenses from his most devoted underlings. Naturally, these have included individuals closest to him—his adult children, his attorneys, and White House officials.

More die-hard demagogues have taken fortified positions on Capitol Hill. As the impeachment inquiry kicks into gear, they are doing whatever they can to downplay the charges and delegitimize the process. In hearings, they demand evidence or dismiss it; in interviews, they dodge the problems and gum up the process. Throughout, they hope that the volume of their voices might overwhelm the volumes of evidence. These Trump loyalists have now lashed themselves to the presidential mast. And if Watergate is an American parable, most of them will go down too.

Richard Nixon avoided prison time thanks to a pardon, but all the president’s men weren’t so lucky. Four dozen were convicted of criminal charges, and about half did time—including Nixon’s chief of staff, White House counsel, top advisers, and attorney general. Some of Trump’s inner circle, including his lawyer and his campaign manager, are already locked up. Odds are, they won’t be the last.

Nixon’s congressional toadies avoided courts of law, but they couldn’t escape the court of public opinion. Republicans fared so badly in the 1974 elections that prominent conservatives pronounced the GOP DOA. The party’s name was “poisoned with negatives,” said strategist Richard Viguerie. It’d be easier to sell “Typhoid Mary, the Edsel, or tickets on the Titanic.” William Rusher, publisher of National Review, wanted to scrap it all and start fresh with a “Conservative Party,” led by Ronald Reagan or George Wallace.

Reports of the Republicans’ demise were greatly exaggerated, of course, as Reagan’s career made clear. No one waged a prouder defense of Tricky Dick. Everything had been “blown out of proportion,” the California governor said in 1973; the burglars “were not criminals at heart.” Even as evidence mounted over 1974, Reagan maintained the inquiry was nothing but “blatant” partisanship. Only in Nixon’s final days did he grudgingly back impeachment.

Reagan’s fealty didn’t harm his long-term prospects, but only because his prospects were long-term. He didn’t face voters in 1974. When he challenged Gerald Ford for the nomination in 1976, the man who’d given excuses for Nixon looked fine compared with the man who’d given him a pardon. By 1980, his water-carrying over Watergate was a non-issue. But in 1974, congressional Republicans didn’t have the luxury of Reagan’s long game. Over 200 GOP members of the House and Senate were on the ballot that fall and needed to convince voters that their action—or inaction—over the president’s conduct was correct.

No one felt the pressure more than Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee. They were the first GOP officials who had to take an official vote on Nixon’s conduct. And, because he resigned before the full House and Senate weighed in, they would be the only ones to do so. In May 1974, when their closed-door hearings began, Time reported that 53 percent of Americans wanted Nixon removed. But that same poll stressed that a “hard-core” of 38 percent was “solidifying into a loyalist bastion that is supporting him with growing determination.”

This not-so-Silent Majority made its feelings clear. That same month, two columnists—liberal Marquis Childs and conservative James J. Kilpatrick—published excerpts from letters sent by “Nixon loyalists,” charging that the “rotten, slanted, and biased” media “brain-washed” voters against their “brilliant” president. They warned impeachment was a “political coup d’état” that would spark “chaos.”

These loyalists spent the summer making a show of their support for Nixon. One group unrolled a 20-foot-long petition in the Oval Office; another held a “pray-in” on the steps of the Capitol. As columnist Art Buchwald marveled, the protesters wore giant sandwich boards with the names and photos of congressmen: “I AM PRAYING FOR ______.”