The title of this article is an imitation of a phrase that had some success in republican circles in the early seventies of the last century, nobody drowned in Watergate.
Actually, it was a play on words alluding to Senator Ted Kennedy's car accident in July 1969, in which a young secretary perished in dubious circumstances. The implication was clear: no matter how many irregularities and even crimes had been committed in the scandal whose start is now half a century old and which ended up costing Richard Nixon the presidency, no one died there.
And not that the accusations were small. Nixon was almost certainly going to face an impeachment trial in the Senate for the alleged crimes of obstruction of justice, abuse of power and contempt of Congress.
Faced with the overwhelming certainty that he was going to be sentenced, in August 1974 he opted for resignation. He was the first president of the United States to make such a dramatic decision and, to date, the only one to have done so.
Last June 17 marked the 50th anniversary of the frustrated assault by the police – notified by a security guard – of the Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate building in the federal capital, the incident that set in motion the entire chain of events which would lead to the aforementioned resignation. But it was the cover-up and the whole corruption scheme that was exposed that caused the snowball effect.
It was never clear what exactly the bumbling spies who staged the raid were looking for, but it is clear that politically their action was wholly superfluous. Just five months later, Richard Nixon was overwhelmingly reelected, winning 49 of the 50 states and reaching nearly 61% of the popular vote, a historical record that no one has managed to beat.
That fiftieth anniversary has coincided with the hearings in Congress on the dramatic assault on the US Congress on January 6, 2021 which, apart from the political seriousness represented by the evident attempt to subvert the constitutional order by a heavily armed mob, it did cause fatalities.
Even this data is surrounded by controversy because there were assailants killed by police shots, but also suicides and fatal cardiovascular accidents associated with the assault.
Be that as it may, and as is being blatantly demonstrated in the aforementioned investigation, the invasion of the Capitol was not a sudden outbreak of violence after the provocative harangue delivered a few hours earlier by the still acting president, Donald Trump.
Rather, it was an attempt, fortunately unsuccessful, to forcibly twist the will of Vice President Mike Pence into violating the Constitution by refusing to ratify the official results of the November 3, 2020 presidential election that gave victory to Joe Biden. .
In short, as profound and heartbreaking as the crisis known as the Watergate scandal was –“our long national nightmare is over”, proclaimed President Gerald Ford after Nixon resigned–, its seriousness pales next to the deadly coup attempt inspired by Donald Trump on January 6, 2021.
And just as that crisis was diagnosed and resolved with a certain bipartisan consensus, the current one catches the country with an absolute and unprecedented polarization, to the point that a possible second presidency of Donald Trump cannot yet be ruled out in absolute terms.
