All of this is relevant to the Trump era. Having won in a landslide in 1972, Nixon was not initially willing to leave the White House. Many feared he might cause martial law. In an Atlantic piece, "The Pardon," Sy Hersh describes how one Watergate prosecutor feared that Nixon might dissolve Congress and call out the troops. Trump isn't a politician and get himself to think like one; he's a megalomaniac, and all bets are off. Roger Stone has just had his 40 month sentence commuted, and is advising Trump to bring in martial law. From CREEP to CREEP. Trump even has a one-man 'plumber' in Rudy Giulani, who has flown to Ukraine on behalf of Trump to brake some pipes. From RICO to RICO. Isn't that a kick in the head? The Republic is in some serious trouble.
Producer Leon Neyfakh closes out the Episode 1 podcast with this note to the listener, which equally applied to the viewer:
In 1975, Martha got sick. She died the following year of cancer. Afterward, her hometown erected a bust in her honor. And on the bust's granite pedestal, there was an inscription: "Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free." In a letter to the editor printed in her local paper in Arkansas, someone wrote, "She was a kind of a dippy saint, a dizzy yet right on the target woman to whom freedom and honesty meant more than protocol and appropriate behavior."
No doubt, she would have had something choice to say about Trump's appointment of her attacker to the ambassadorship of the Czech Republic. F*ck Steve King.
More recently, Neyfakh has produced a second season of Slow Burn for Slate - this one dealing with Bill Clinton's presidency. This period, too, has plenty of resonance for our current Carnivalesque happenings in DC. Sure, there's the Blowjob we like to replay, but more importantly is the more recent outrage of discovering that Ken Starr, the independent prosecutor brought in to hound Clinton from office for said BJ, was on the defense team for Jeffrey Epstein, which got the pedophile a 40-month prison deal that saw him on work-release from Day1 (going to a company he set up for that purpose). When Monica Lewinsky found out that Starr would be on the Trump impeachment defense team, she exclaimed to a reporter, "Are you f*cking kidding me?" Stone and Starr and let's not forget Barr, the lock-em-up-and-throw-away-the-key AG.
Punked again, bring it over.
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