The big problem with comparing Nixon to Trump

It’s tempting to draw comparisons between Richard Nixon and Donald Trump. Both presidents were dogged by major FBI investigations. Both were accused of obstructing justice. And both lashed out at the media for covering those investigations, which they described as “witch hunts.”

Those similarities have led some to argue that, like Nixon, Trump might be on his way to facing impeachment.

But while the Watergate investigation led to Nixon’s resignation, Trump has support from a source that Nixon could never have dreamed of — a powerful conservative media ecosystem. As special counsel Robert Mueller investigates whether Trump violated campaign finance laws or obstructed justice, Fox News and other conservative outlets have dedicated themselves to undermine the institutions that hold the executive branch accountable.

“In the 1970s, there tended to be an agreed-upon set of facts that the journalist reported. So if you watch the CBS or NBC and ABC newscast, there would be some variation on the stories they covered and what they emphasize and didn’t emphasize. But they agreed mostly on what was happening,” says Jon Marshall, author of Watergate’s Legacy and the Press: The Investigative Impulse.

“I don’t think that [agreement] exists today.”

Since Robert Mueller’s investigation started, conservative media outlets have worked tirelessly to raise doubts about the special counsel’s credibility, depict the FBI as corrupt and biased, and downplay the seriousness of the allegations against the White House. And in a fractured media landscape, where Republican voters largely get their news from right-leaning publications, experts like University of Virginia professor Nicole Hemmer worry that those messages will have a big impact on Republicans in Congress.

Republican politicians “know that the Republican base is tuned in to conservative media and hearing these messages that the Mueller investigation is a sham, that this is a project of the ‘deep state’ to bring down the president,” says Hemmer, who wrote Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics. “If a Republican politician breaks with that, then all of a sudden, it looks like he’s siding with the enemy. In that environment, politicians have to choose sides. And if you’re a Republican, do you choose to side with the media that all your base listen to, or do you choose to side with the one they all oppose?”

There’s already evidence that congressional Republicans might be willing to turn their backs on the Mueller investigation under pressure from conservative media. House Republicans have released a report attempting to preemptively undermine the Mueller investigation, and many Republicans have begun echoing Fox News’s talking points about Mueller’s credibility.

Though it’s too early to know how the Mueller investigation will conclude, Hemmer doubts Trump will face the same fate Nixon did.

“It’s just very hard to imagine a future in which … all of a sudden, [Republicans] are going to say, ‘Oh, wait, we now need to listen to this independent counsel who most of the conservative media have been undermining and delegitimizing for months now,’” Hemmer says. “I just I don’t know what incentive there would be for them to do that. And I don’t think that we’ve seen any behavior from Republicans in the past 14 months that suggests that they’re willing to do that.”

“If we lived in the same kind of fractured media world during Watergate, where there is a Fox News and there is Rush Limbaugh, Breitbart, and the Daily Caller,” Marshall echoes, “I think Nixon would have lasted in the presidency for several more months, if not for his entire term.”

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