The federal government passed a whole raft of laws in the wake of the 1970s Watergate scandal, aimed at curbing the power of the presidency and imposing widespread ethical reforms, but according to a new analysis from the New York Times, since returning to the White House, Donald Trump has been systemically crushing these laws "as if in a shooting gallery."
The Watergate scandal began in 1972, when reporting uncovered efforts by President Richard Nixon to surveil his Democratic rivals by bugging their National Committee headquarters in Washington, D.C. The scandal bloomed ever bigger over the course of two years, with ever more "revelations of rot in the Nixon administration" coming to light, according to Times reporter Matthew Purdy, ultimately leading to Nixon's resignation in 1974 ahead of an impeachment inquiry.
Fearing that the affair had critically damaged the public's trust in its government, Congress undertook a massive reform campaign, passing a whole host of laws to rein in the presidency. According to Purdy's analysis, "a strain of conservative legal thinking has been aiming to reassert the president’s powers ever since they were curbed in the post-Watergate era," and in Trump's second term, it has found the most success, with the president systematically wrecking laws, norms and positions specifically created in response to Watergate.
"From the opening days of his second term, President Trump took aim at Watergate’s ethical checkpoints as if in a shooting gallery," Purdy wrote, first noting how Trump, "fired 17 inspectors general, a job established in the Watergate era to ferret out waste, fraud and abuse in government."
This move came as Trump and his newly created "DOGE" office claimed to be going after waste, fraud and abuse in the federal government.
The firings did not step there, Purdy continued.
"He also fired the head of the Office of Special Counsel, an independent agency created by legislation in 1978 to protect government whistle-blowers," he wrote. "Then he fired the director of the Office of Government Ethics, created around the same time to guard against financial conflicts of interest by top government officials. And he has used the Justice Department and the F.B.I. as political tools, roles they worked to shed after Watergate."
The "raw result" of this approach, despite the "high-minded Constitutional argument" Trump's legal aides put forward for it, has been to empower his use of the presidency to pursue his own personal whims and desires.
"He has removed barriers that might slow his pursuit of a highly personal presidency — punishing opponents and rewarding allies and financial backers while also reaping profits for family businesses that intersect with his powers as president," Purdy explained.