Ask A Genius 337 – When the Presidenting Gets Tough, the Tough Twitter
November 8, 2017
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is the relationship between Watergate and Trump?
Rick Rosner: In a nutshell, it looks probable that this will get worse than Watergate because Trump’s support is holding up. During Watergate, it was possible to get Nixon out. The Republican leadership went to Nixon and said that the country’s lost confidence in you.
Nixon agreed with that assessment and left office, but Trump is not somebody to do that and he continues to have the support of three-eighths of the country. So, it’s a crisis that may not break for quite a while.
It’s got a certain stability, which may allow it to get worse and worse before there’s any resolution. Plus, like Trump says stupid shit; he tweets stupid shit every day. Nixon had some of the political savvy to not make his position worse every single day of the week.
So, it’s made me wonder. It is one of those situations where people will soon start asking themselves, “Is it time for us to start taking personal action to protect ourselves?” But that seems like an overreaction because most of all this stuff is taking place on Twitter and among a few people in Washington.
It’s not like Germany in the ‘30s when people were getting attacked on the street, but it still, if you’re not an idiot, feels different from any other point of politics during our lives. We’ve had some weird points. We had the weird political limbo of Bush versus Gore after the election in 2000.
We’ve already had the weirdness of Trump and losing the popular vote by 2.8 million votes still not admitting it. I mean, there are extra dimensions to the weirdness because Trump has been doing weird shit since he got elected and even before.
It’s possible to think that this isn’t a weird moment because it’s more Trump, but it’s a point of political peril. It doesn’t seem like it will break for months and months. And he got rid of Sean Spicer, the Press Secretary.
The new guy who’s not the Press Secretary will be running the communications offices is slick and well-spoken and that guy might be better at running a communications office than whoever was in charge before and because of his slickness might even increase Trump’s popularity, even in the middle of Trump being consistently terrible at his job and at optics.
So, anyway, we’re in trouble. It looks like the trouble is going to go on for months and months to come. That’s it.
[End of recorded material]
Authors[1]
Rick Rosner
American Television Writer
Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Editor-in-Chief, In-Sight Publishing
Footnotes
[1] Four format points for the session article:
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Rick Rosner 