Inevitably, the puzzling, peculiar and increasingly alarming events surrounding the presidency of Donald Trump have caused people to ask if this country is going through another Watergate.
So far, the answer has been no, because Watergate was a unique chapter in US history. The series of bizarre happenings that confounded, entertained — producing nervous laughter — and frightened those who went through it, and ended in the forced resignation of a president, has always seemed unrepeatable. But there can be and are some striking parallels between the dramatic events surrounding Richard Nixon in 1973 and 1974 and the nascent presidency of Mr Trump. How the current set of events will end is of course unknowable. The nearly unspoken question in Washington is whether the US is at the start of something that could again end in a president having to leave office before the end of a four-year term.
We are unlikely ever again to have a president who in order to carry out his paranoid obsessions approves the hiring of a goon squad to break and enter various places in order to “get the goods” on his “enemies”, and still others to act as bagmen trying to buy their silence.