• Home
• /
• Opinion

White House in meltdown; lies and deceit lie beneath

The whistle blower in the exploding Trump drama is the new "Deep Throat". Day by day, the pieces are falling into place, resembling a 3D picture that looks eerily like Watergate. When the Watergate scandal was first revealed, no one would have thought it would be connected to the President of the United States of America.
Republicans did not want to believe that Nixon was capable of such a scandalous story. Watergate generated an attitude of cynicism and mistrust that remains with us today. Tump's Ukraine scandal is an absolute rerun of events that shook America in 1972. The re-enactment is ominious and truly staggering in its similarity in every aspect of events as they are now unfolding in Washington. In the years since Nixon's downfall, Watergate has provided the prevailing metaphor for scandal in Washington.
As events escalate, the similarities are striking - a willingness to tap into the darker currents and the American political climate, a complete disregard for the rule of law.
Trump is an accomplished strategist with a deep understanding of today's politics. But his hatred of the liberal press will eventually consume his presidency. He is nursing his anger and resentments and is weaponising them with Michiavellian tactics.
The Ukraine debacle could be the "smoking gun" that spells the end for the president. Parallels with Watergate are becoming uncanny, and full of foreboding for this unstable and beleaguered president. Leaks infuriated Nixon just as they enrage Trump.
The American president resembles the figure of a volatile, unpredictable leader, obsessed by his enemies, real and imagined, and callous in his disrecpect for the US Constitution which he sees as an impediment to his rightful exercise of untrammelled power.
Trump's bravado, hubris and battery of lies will prove to be his undoing. His errors and outright fabrications are legion.
Like Richard Nixon, Donald Trump is radically escalating his vicious campaign to discredit the multiple institutions that are investigating him. Donald Trump is willing to lie, commit perjury, prepared to obfuscate, and to conceal for the purpose of grimly holding on to power.
Like his Russian friend, Putin, he is acutely aware that if he loses or is forced to abdicate, prison awaits him.
The writer is based in South Africa