The Saturday Night Massacre got to the heart of the issue that fueled the Watergate scandal and the rage with Richard Nixon. The problem wasn’t simply that so many Democrats disliked Nixon as a person and a politician, nor was it simply the break in at the DNC headquarters at the Watergate complex. The problem was the presidency itself.

Over course of the 20th century, liberals and conservatives had so greatly empowered the executive branch that the institution had become ripe for abuse. Democrats had seen a strong presidency as the only way to push liberal ideas through the conservative coalition of southern Democrats and Republicans in Congress. Post-World War II Republicans saw a strong presidency as the only way to ensure that aggressive military policies were enacted to fight against communism.

The Saturday Night Massacre revealed clearly just how forcefully a bad president could act if someone tried to get in his way. After almost a decade of living through the horrendous war in Vietnam, where many felt that Congress sat on its hands as presidents pushed the nation into a quagmire without a congressional declaration of war, the Saturday Night Massacre struck a raw nerve in a body politic that was growing weary of what the historian Arthur Schlesinger called the “Imperial Presidency.” The realization was that it had become too easy for someone like Nixon to do what he did in October 1973.

The result of Watergate was not just the resignation of Nixon, but a whole series of reforms meant to strengthen Congress and rein in the presidency. The War Powers Act of 1973 aimed to reassert congressional authority over the use of force overseas. The Budget Act of 1974 aimed to centralize the budgeting process and give Congress a stronger voice when shaping the federal budget. The Ethics in Government Act of 1978 created regulations, as well as an Office of the Independent Counsel, to prevent executive-branch corruption from occurring more often.

But over the following decades many of those reforms fell by the wayside, and both parties rebuilt the authority of the executive branch. The horror of 9/11 was an especially important moment when the presidency underwent a vast expansion of power that greatly weakened the ability of Congress to constrain the White House.

Today, we are back to a similar place as in October 1973. This is why the new Nixonian story about Trump and Mueller is so unsettling. While it is true that this time the massacre did not happen, it is too easy to see how it could have gone a different way.

For all the anger about Trump himself, what Americans have really been awakened to is just how powerful we have allowed the presidency to become at the expense of Congress. When Trump tweeted out one of his provocative statements about North Korea, he dramatized how easy it would be for a reckless president to drag us into a nuclear war. When Trump single-handedly used executive orders to dismantle climate change regulations and international agreements, he showed just how much damage a president can inflict on public policy regardless of what Congress does or does not do. And the reports that Trump has already tried to fire the person whom his own Justice Department appointed to investigate possible collusion in the 2016 election and the obstruction of justice are a reminder that the existing president still possesses many of the powers that were so troubling back in 1973. In some ways, the presidency is even more awesome in its strength.