Comparing the Trump case with Watergate: From an August 2023 NPR interview with Jill Wine-Banks, a special assistant prosecutor in the Watergate case:
LEILA FADEL, HOST: The Watergate scandal led to President Richard Nixon's resignation in 1974. It set a standard for presidential wrongdoing. But ex-President Donald Trump's alleged criminality now appears set to far exceed that standard, should the four indictments currently brought against him ultimately win out in court. Our colleague Steve Inskeep spoke earlier about all this with Jill Wine-Banks. She served as an assistant special prosecutor in the Watergate investigation.
STEVE INSKEEP: I want to ask a question that I think you have been asked 47,000 times before, but I think it is a reasonable place to start. How do the accusations against Trump in trying to overturn an election compare to Watergate?
JILL WINE-BANKS: There's no comparison in my mind. The actions of Donald Trump leading up to January 6 and continuing to this day to me are much more dangerous to democracy than anything Richard Nixon did. Richard Nixon was guilty. He was a crook. He should have been indicted. He shouldn't have been pardoned. But what he did is child's play compared to what happened. I believe his pardon enabled what happened. But I never feared for democracy the way I do now.
INSKEEP: Let's remember what it was that Nixon did. Aides and associates of Nixon conducted a burglary of the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington, D.C., and the investigation of that led to a lot of other political so-called dirty tricks. Did Nixon at some level accept that - democratic system - he needed to listen to the will of the people and deal with reality?
WINE-BANKS: He did. He knew shame, and he was told that he would be convicted in the Senate on the charges of impeachment that had been voted if he didn't resign, and he resigned. He never acknowledged officially and, in fact, probably denied in the David Frost interview that he was guilty because he said it's not illegal if you're the president. But he did respond to the will of the people. It was clear that he had lost the support of America and of his own party. This was a time of bipartisanship. It was a time of facts. And everybody accepted the facts, including him, which was that he had been found to have plenty of evidence against him showing his guilt. And he resigned.
INSKEEP: As you investigated the president - and again, this is a sitting president who had been elected and then reelected - did the public support you?
WINE-BANKS: We had huge public support, and we never had the kind of lack of facts that exists now. So we always had more support than I think some people in America now give to the special prosecutor.
Daily Beast - Donald Trump has claimed he’s better for Jewish Americans than Democrats, but according to a former senior Trump Organization executive, the former president reveled in making Nazi jokes around his Jewish employees. Former Trump Organization executive vice president Barbara Res told MSNBC’s Ali Velshi that Trump once made a joke about a German residential manager the company had hired before turning to some Trump Organization executives who happened to be Jewish.“He was bragging amongst executives about how great the guy was and he was a real gentleman and so neat and clean and then he looked at a couple of our executives who happen to be Jewish, and he said, ‘Watch out for this guy, he sort of remembers the ovens,’ and then smiled,” said Res, who left her role in 1998 after she claimed Trump mistreated her and other employees.
The comment left the group dumbfounded according to Res. “Everybody was shocked,” she said. “I cannot believe he said that. He was making a joke about the Nazi ovens and eating people.” Trump has since tried to claim that Jewish Americans who vote for Democrats hate both Israel and Judaism, saying he and the Republican Party were best positioned to end Israel’s war in Gaza.
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