The impeachment inquiry into President Trump has the drama of Watergate, but it is playing out in a more frenetic and ferocious media world than the 1970s.
He sat in a tan suit and a blue shirt. His mouth pressed close to a silver microphone. His words came slowly, as if each was climbing out from beneath a great weight. Sweat glistened on his forehead. Men peered at him from across a green tablecloth. They wanted answers. The man spoke, and the nation slipped to a darker place.
“It’s tabloid culture and sensational news and Trump has learned to say bravado things unbacked by facts, and if you throw them out there enough you confuse people,” said Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian and professor at Rice University. “It’s two different worlds. In Watergate in the ’70s you still had bipartisanship on Capitol Hill. People would go to dinner parties with each other. There was a sense of official Washington versus Richard Nixon.
Enter Trump. He curses, tweets, threatens, wants his opponents tried for treason. Like a Netflix series bristling with intrigue and odd asides — a whistleblower, henchmen and a Ukrainian president who was once a comedian — Trump is a master at shifting narratives. He is a one-man storm, a businessman-turned-politician-turned-cable news windfall. He is as much a part of his era as Cronkite was of his, and the arc between them reveals how our need for veracity has often succumbed to rage and spin.
From battles over the size of the crowd at his inauguration to the Mueller investigation on Russia’s influence in the 2016 election, Trump, even as he has given late show writers grist for parody and satire, has endured. He is the product of a time when the threshold for shame is high and people, from Instagrammers
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