If Donald Trump hoped to understand what he would face upon moving into the White House in 2017, he would have done well to study what happened to Richard Nixon nearly fifty years prior.
Richard Nixon was a staunch anti-communist who came into office opposed by every D.C.-based institution: Not only both Houses of Congress, but by their congressional staffs, the federal bureaucracy, and all of the Washington law firms, think tanks, and lobby firms. The liberal media also opposed him.
They were out to get Nixon from the start — even more so after his landslide re-election in 1972. That’s where Watergate came in. The Deep State fooled millions of people into believing Richard Nixon’s guilt, which even many Republicans believe to this day. For a long time, I was one of them.
During the Nixon Administration, I worked on the President’s defense team as we weathered the storms of criticism stemming from the 1972 Watergate break-in. I lost friends and spent a couple of years trying to refute sensational media claims. We fought unscrupulous prosecutors, reporters and congressional staff. We worked tirelessly to clear the good name of Richard Nixon, a man I’d known and admired since college and whom I was honored to come to Washington to serve.
