HST Fridays....Who Will Be Mr. Trump's Little Johnny Dean?

ItWasANicePlace
TheyWerePrincipledPeopleGenerallyVille

When the Watergate investigations first started Richard Nixon was riding high in the polls.

But as the focused reportage (rather than single in-'n-out news cycle hits) got rolling in earnest and the daily hearings on the TeeVee began in the spring of 1973 those positive numbers began to fall precipitously for months on end.

The biggest drop occurred during the summer of 1973 when millions of housewives and Hunter S. Thompson got hooked on the daily soap opera that was driven by the testimony of a scared straight former food soldier in Mr. Nixon's obstruction offensive named John Dean who suddenly decided to do the right thing and tell the truth.

Here's what Thompson had to say about that summer, and that TeeVee show that dominated it, not in Jann Wenner's pulp of quasi-fiction, but instead on the OpEd page of the New York Times on the first day of 1974:

There is some kind of heavy connection between that memory (of my childhood time as a milkman's foot soldier) and the way I feel right now about this stinking year that just ended. 

Everybody I talk to seems very excited about it. “God damn, man! it was a fantastic year,” they say. “Maybe the most incredible year in our history.”

Which is probably true. I remember thinking that way, myself, back on those hot summer mornings when John Dean's face lit my tube day after day incredible. Here was this crafty little fellow going down the pipe right in front of our eyes and taking Richard Nixon with him.

It was almost too good to be true. Richard Milhous Nixon, the main villain of my political consciousness for as long as I can remember, was finally biting that bullet he's been talking about all those years. The man that not even Goldwater or Eisenhower could tolerate had finally gone too far —and now he was walking the plank, on national TV, six hours a day—with the whole world watching, as it were...

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So.

If the current crop of Democrats does finally manage to get up the gumption to start a daily soap opera focussed on Mr. Trump's own obstruction offensive, who might turn out to be the Donald's little Johnny Dean?

Well...

Some might predict Michael Cohen.

But my money is on Don McGahn.

And, apparently, the good Mr. Trump is a little worried about that prospect as well, judging by his response to stories of his former counsel's reported cooperation with the Mueller team last summer:

President Donald Trump insisted Sunday that White House lawyer Don McGahn isn’t “a John Dean type ‘RAT,”‘ making reference to the Watergate-era White House attorney who turned on Richard Nixon.

Trump, in a series of angry tweets, blasted a New York Times story reporting that McGahn has been co-operating extensively with the special counsel team investigating Russian election meddling and potential collusion with Trump’s Republican campaign...


Curiously, the AP reporter of that time, Jill Colvin, left out the 'O' word that was front and center in the Mueller Report, Volume 2, and in Mr. Mueller's testimony before Congress last week:

Robert Mueller confirmed former White House counsel Don McGahn was pressured to lie by the White House about whether he was ever asked by Donald Trump to fire the former special counsel while testifying before the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday.

"The president told the White House staff secretary, Rob Porter, to try to pressure [Don] McGahn to make a false denial. Is that correct?" Democrat Karen Bass asked Mr Mueller.


"That's correct,” he replied...


Imagine that!


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