Trump’s legal expenses alone are likely to be daunting. Because their jurisdictions lie outside the federal realm, any indictments or convictions resulting from their actions would be beyond the reach of a Presidential pardon. Cyrus Vance, Jr., the Manhattan District Attorney, and Letitia James, New York’s attorney general, are independently pursuing potential criminal charges related to Trump’s business practices before he became President. Two of the investigations into Trump are being led by powerful state and city law-enforcement officials in New York. Even if Trump wins, grave legal and financial threats will loom over his second term. That run of good luck may well end, perhaps brutally, if he loses to Joe Biden. Few people have evaded consequences more cunningly. Nixon spoke of the cell door clanging shut.” Trump has famously survived one impeachment, two divorces, six bankruptcies, twenty-six accusations of sexual misconduct, and an estimated four thousand lawsuits. The Presidential historian Michael Beschloss said of Trump, “If he loses, you have a situation that’s not dissimilar to that of Nixon when he resigned. Given that more than a dozen investigations and civil suits involving Trump are currently under way, he could be looking at an endgame even more perilous than the one confronted by Nixon.
But, as Donald Trump fights to hold on to the White House, he and those around him surely know that if he loses-an outcome that nobody should count on-the presumption of immunity that attends the Presidency will vanish. No American President has ever been charged with a criminal offense. Nixon himself, however, escaped prosecution because his successor, Gerald Ford, granted him a pardon, in September, 1974. Twenty-nine individuals closely tied to his Administration were subsequently indicted, and several of his top aides and advisers, including his Attorney General, John Mitchell, went to prison.
That August, the Watergate scandal forced Nixon-who had been cornered by self-incriminating White House tape recordings, and faced impeachment and removal from office-to resign.
The downfall of Richard Nixon, in the summer of 1974, was, as Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein relate in “ The Final Days,” one of the most dramatic in American history. “What has happened?” When the President noted that the military could make it easy for him by leaving a pistol in a desk drawer, the chief of staff called the President’s doctors and ordered that all sleeping pills and tranquillizers be taken away from him, to insure that he wouldn’t have the means to kill himself. He wasn’t especially religious, but, as daylight faded outside the rapidly emptying White House, he fell to his knees and prayed out loud, sobbing as he smashed his fist into the carpet. Sensing that time was running out, he had asked his aides to draw up a list of his political options. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
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