Nixon and Trump 2.0

In 1972, Richard M. Nixon committed crimes while serving as President of the United States. He launched a massive cover-up to conceal his crimes, but when they were discovered, a special prosecutor was hired to investigate them.

When the prosecutor issued subpoenas for critical tape recordings of Nixon’s conversations in the White House, Nixon had the prosecutor fired in what became known as “The Saturday Night Massacre.”

Congress conducted hearings into the so-called “Watergate Affair” and, eventually, reacted to Nixon’s firing of the prosecutor by drafting three articles of impeachment alleging obstruction of justice, abuse of power and contempt of Congress.

Before he could be impeached, Nixon resigned.

Fast-forward 46 years. Donald J. Trump is alleged to have committed crimes while serving as President of the United States. He has spent two years denying the allegations and attempting to conceal his crimes, but a special counsel has been appointed to investigate them.

Now that the investigation is getting close to the president, Trump has taken the first steps toward getting the special counsel fired. It started yesterday when Trump fired Attorney General Jeff Sessions and replaced him with a man loyal to Trump who has publicly called the investigation a “witch hunt.”

In a normal world, Congress would react to this “Wednesday Afternoon Massacre” by conducting hearings into Trump’s actions which, presumably, would result in the drafting of articles of impeachment alleging, say, such things as obstruction of justice, abuse of power and contempt of Congress.

But wait!

I just used the words “normal” and “Trump” in the same sentence. Nothing about Trump is normal, certainly nothing about his presidency or his twisted ideas of how the world works or what it means to sit in the Oval Office. Nothing is normal about our Republican-controlled House of Representatives, which launched a sham investigation into Trump’s conspiracy with Russia to manipulate the 2016 election, then called it off when Trump objected by saying it didn’t find any evidence of anything.

Nothing to see here, right?

As a side note, after a press conference yesterday, Trump banned a CNN reporter from the White House because the journalist dared to challenge Trump to answer difficult questions. For the record, Nixon had threatened to ban The Washington Post because it refused to stop investigating Watergate. Banning the free press from doing its job? There’s nothing normal about that, either.

So tick, tock…the saga continues. Today is another day and no doubt there are more surprises ahead. It’s impossible to know what will happen next, especially when the pathological liar we elected president stands before the media after losing control of the House and declares the election a major Republican victory, and when a man who completely lacks any semblance of morals declares himself to be a “great moral leader.”

Whatever happens today, tomorrow and the days after that, one thing is certain: It will not be normal. I’ve been watching a series of History channel documentaries on all of our American presidents. When History gets around to covering No. 45 some day, I’m predicting they’ll open the episode with the words, “It was the most abnormal administration in the history of the United States.”

And even that will be an understatement.