Watergate led to new ethical guardrails. Trump is tearing them down.

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In August 1974, facing impeachment for obstruction of justice and abuse of power, President Richard Nixon resigned from office. In the decade that followed, Congress created a series of institutional safeguards designed to uphold a basic principle of democratic governance: Those who hold public office, including the president, should serve the public, not themselves.

These reforms were passed by large bipartisan majorities and signed into law by presidents of both parties. The Inspector General Act placed independent watchdogs, intended to survive changes in administrations, inside every major federal agency to root out fraud, waste and abuse and report their findings to agency heads and Congress. The Ethics in Government Act created an office to oversee executive branch ethics programs and prevent financial conflicts of interest. The Civil Service Reform Act strengthened protections for federal government whistleblowers.

Fifty years after Watergate, President Trump has ignored, undercut or torn down almost every one of these guardrails. In the process, he has made conflicts of interest easier to conceal, whistleblowers less likely to come forward, and official misconduct harder to identify, let alone stop.

And, as we have previously indicated, Trump has refused to follow the practice of past presidents, who put their assets in blind trusts to avoid even the appearance of conflicts of interest. Instead, he has used his office to help himself and members of his family amass more than $4 billion, with new conflicts of interest surfacing almost daily.

Inspectors general, whom President Jimmy Carter called “perhaps the most important tools in the fight against fraud,” may be the most consequential casualties of Trump’s second term.

When President Ronald Reagan fired 15 inspectors general in 1981, treating them like other political appointees, bipartisan backlash forced him and his successors to respect their role and their independence. But on the fifth day of his second term, Trump fired 17 of them in a late-night purge, including at the Departments of Defense, State, Justice, Interior, Housing and Urban Development, and Veterans Affairs, without providing the advance notice or substantive justification to Congress required by law.

A federal judge ruled the firings unlawful but declined to reinstate the individuals who had been fired. Since then, the administration has fired or forced out at least four more inspectors general, leaving more than 70 percent of Senate-confirmed inspector general positions vacant, and proposed cutting their collective budgets by 23 percent.

The Office of Government Ethics, which played a pivotal role in previous conflicts with Trump, has fared no better. In February 2025, Trump removed its Senate-confirmed director, David Huitema, three months into his five-year term, by email and without explanation. Last week, Trump finally nominated a successor, Michael Chamberlain, whom critics view as a “hyper partisan political operative.”

Trump also fired the head of the Office of Special Counsel, the independent body that protects whistleblowers and enforces the Hatch Act, the law limiting political activity by federal employees. Trump then stripped civil service protections from 8,000 senior government officials, the people most likely to witness and report official misconduct.

Last June, Trump gutted yet another post-Watergate creation, the Justice Department’s Office of Public Integrity. He got rid of 25 of its 30 lawyers, stripped the office of its authority to file new corruption cases, and suspended the requirement that it review every case brought against a member of Congress or other public official, a safeguard against politically motivated prosecutions.

Trump has weaponized the Justice Department to punish his perceived enemies, while issuing an unprecedented blizzard of pardons to political allies, campaign contributors, convicted January 6 rioters and defendants, and wealthy individuals with connections to his family’s business interests, despite convictions ranging from drug trafficking, assault and embezzlement to corruption, money laundering and fraud.

As the administration dismantles Watergate’s institutional legacy, it is also attempting to redefine Watergate itself. Speaking recently at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library, Vice President JD Vance insisted that, these days, Watergate would amount to little more than “a 12-hour news story,” before adding, “The idea that it would have taken down a presidency is crazy.”

We draw very different lessons. Watergate’s crimes included burglary, bribery, misuse of campaign funds, destruction of evidence, and obstruction of an FBI investigation. Most of the dozens of individuals charged — including two Cabinet members — pleaded guilty or were convicted. And President Ford tarnished his own reputation and the fortunes of the Republican Party for several election cycles by pardoning Nixon.

Equally important, Watergate reforms were bipartisan, not at all the “deep state” conspiracy Vance imagines. The Inspector General Act passed the Senate by unanimous consent. The Ethics in Government Act passed the House 365-6.

That said, it seems clear that the reformers of the 1970s did not anticipate a president so contemptuous of ethical norms, a Congress so obsequious, a Supreme Court so accommodating, or a public so inured to political corruption and presidential self-dealing.

The question facing voters today is whether they understand the real lesson of Watergate: that preserving democracy requires clear ethics rules and institutions strong enough to enforce them, even when presidents will not.

David Wippman is emeritus president of Hamilton College. Glenn C. Altschuler is The Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Emeritus Professor of American Studies at Cornell University.