One is the president who will be meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Vietnam. The second summit between these two leaders brings with it speculation about a major diplomatic breakthrough that could include a peace deal with a concrete plan for verifiable denuclearization.
The other Trump is the one we'll see when his former fixer Michael Cohen testifies publicly Wednesday before the House Oversight Committee about possible wrongdoing that he alleges the President committed. In a court appearance in December, Cohen said, "time and again, I felt it was my duty to cover up his dirty deeds rather than to listen to my own inner voice and my moral compass." Cohen was sentenced to three years in prison partly for making false statements to Congress, a fact that GOP supporters of the President may use to argue that he is a liar whose testimony cannot be trusted.
This moment of split-screen politics raises the question of whether major progress overseas can save a president from his political problems at home.
Would Trump's ability to broker a durable and verifiable peace deal -- one that has remained elusive to numerous presidents -- to formally end the Korean War, nearly 66 years after an armistice was signed, overshadow the intensifying investigations that his administration faces? Can President Trump pull off the ultimate distraction, not one that revolves around a provocative tweet but instead one that is based on a genuine breakthrough in foreign policy?
Back to Nixon
As with so many aspects of the Trump presidency, these questions naturally bring us back to President Richard Nixon. When Nixon found himself in trouble starting in the fall of 1972 (Texas Democrat Wright Patman launched the first hearings in October, though he didn't find much support), there was hope within the President's inner circle that his success overseas would be sufficient to carry him through a second term.
Nixon's historic diplomatic breakthroughs in 1972, which included opening relations with China and negotiating the SALT I arms accord with the Soviet Union, were widely considered to be triumphs in US foreign policy.
Nixon, who had been a Cold War hawk during much of his career, shocked the nation by starting a process that thawed tensions between the superpowers. This was welcome news for most amid the disastrous Vietnam War and decades of fears about the looming possibility of nuclear war.
The diplomacy was considered an important factor in enabling Nixon's landslide re-election victory against Sen. George McGovern. The President, who started his second term with a 68% approval rating, continued to gain praise in 1973 with how his administration handled the Yom Kippur War in the Middle East and brokered the Paris Peace Accords, which ended the US role in Vietnam's civil war.
Although the right grumbled that his policy of détente was too soft on communism and the left never trusted him because of his secret bombing campaign in Cambodia and the ruthless Christmas bombing of North Vietnam, foreign policy was believed to be one of Nixon's greatest assets as the multiple investigations into his administration heated up.
The fallout
But foreign policy was not enough to save Nixon from the political fallout of Watergate. Despite everything that was happening overseas, the Congress, Judge John Sirica, special prosecutor Leon Jaworski, as well as dogged investigative reporters like Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, did not stop working diligently to piece together the evidence they were finding of the administration's corruption. The investigators refused to be distracted as they discovered more evidence of the administration's role in the break-in of the Democratic national headquarters in June 1972, of the President's abuse of presidential power, and ultimately of his efforts to obstruct justice. The President's approval ratings steadily eroded.
In that era, Congress was a much bigger part of the investigation and this was vital to how the scandal unfolded. Through televised hearings and their own investigation, Sen. Sam Ervin's Watergate Committee and Peter Rodino's Judiciary Committee were able to make sure that the investigation remained credible to the public.
Under their skillful leadership, the congressional committees heard testimony that pieced together a complicated story and made it clear why the individual revelations added up to something bigger. Both men gradually built bipartisan support for impeachment even though for much of the time, Republicans insisted on standing by the President. They also made sure that the evidence was really there before moving forward with impeachment.
Nor did it help Nixon that his success overseas seemed less grand when OPEC clamped down on oil exports in 1973, leaving Americans to face an energy crisis with long gas lines.
The lessons from Nixon's saga are clear. A foreign policy breakthrough is not enough to quash a major presidential scandal. Though President Nixon is still often praised by historians as one of the more successful foreign policy presidents, he is also the one who had to resign in the middle of his second term. The split screen didn't save him.
The question today is not so much whether foreign policy developments will overshadow domestic controversy, but how the different components of the investigation handle their responsibilities in finding out what wrongdoing might have happened and in determining what action, if any, is needed.
The problems that we have on that front -- the scattershot contributions of Congress thus far, the willingness of Republicans to stifle a solid investigation, the ability of partisanship in the electorate to protect Trump's standing in red states, the limits of what Mueller can put in his report and the potential secrecy of his findings, and the siloed, fragmented partisan news media -- these are much more likely to protect the President if impeachable findings emerge than anything that goes on in Vietnam.
Bagikan Berita Ini
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