The Weirdness of Watergate as a Millennial
In the weeks leading up to Mueller’s delivery of his report on Trump on Friday afternoon, cable news has indulged in impeachment nostalgia. When I watch CNN with my parents, I see constant ads for the network’s documentary series on Nixon, Tricky Dick. It’s easy to overstate the parallels between Nixon and Trump, including their attempts to suppress the freedom of the press. The nostalgia arises from Nixon’s path to resignation or potential impeachment, which seems less complex than Trump’s in many ways. Although Nixon had much more experience in politics and law than Trump does, the Democratic Congress was willing to investigate — and if necessary, impeach — Nixon.
As a Millennial, one aspect of the Nixon story has always baffled me: Nixon’s over-reliance on technology. Of course, the wiretapping of the Democratic Party’s headquarters was a major aspect of the Watergate scandal. The Internet age didn’t invent the abuse of classified information, but it certainly facilitated it.
Nowadays, we’re used to all of our data being digitized and quantified in some way. In the 1970s, though, this was not the case. Today, many conversations take place across multiple digital platforms that would have occurred in person or over landlines in past decades — if they occurred at all. Short of wiretapping, these conversations would not have been traceable.
That’s what I find so ironic and fascinating about the Nixon White House tapes. Why create data where none existed before? Why create a record for posterity if you know that you and your associates are committing crimes or making racist or anti-Semitic comments? To me, Nixon’s desire to preserve his own conversations was a form of hubris, which created a completely avoidable problem for him. The irony of using analog technology to create the type of footprint that we all have online today is staggering.
If Nixon’s downfall came partly from abusing the technology of his day and failing to destroy evidence, Trump is guilty of the same mistakes, only on a much larger scale. Every day, Trump produces an unprecedented amount of data compared to presidents pre-Twitter. Sometimes, I think that he has a new scandal each day that would take down any other president — particularly one who isn’t a white man with a cult-like following. With Trump, there’s exponentially more data to sift through than with past administrations, but this means more evidence of any criminal and/or impeachable offenses. Tweets and emails aren’t trivial: they’re evidence of a pattern of ongoing, criminal, unconstitutional behavior.
The challenge lies in how Barr and Congress analyze the information and whether it’s released to the public. As Americans, I think that it’s our civic duty to read the full Mueller report and have opinions on it.
