The following article by Cody Fenwick was posted on the AlterNet.org website August 20, 2018:
We’ve seen this script before.
President Donald Trump himself is now invoking allusions to the Watergate era as he attacks the ongoing investigation into his ties to Russia’s interference in the 2016 campaign — and he is bizarrely only making himself look even more guilty in doing so.
Timothy Naftali, a CNN presidential historian, spoke with host Brooke Baldwin Monday and argued that Trump is now echoing President Richard Nixon’s defenders during the Watergate scandal. They discussed Trump’s recent referral to John Dean, the White House counsel who ended up testifying against the president, as a “rat.”
“I learned when I was director of the Nixon library that there is a core of people in the United States who are Nixon Watergate defenders. For them, John Dean is a villain,” he explained. “So President Trump, who was friends with Roy Cohn, is channeling that kind of hatred of John Dean.”