For proponents of ethical reforms, transparency and good government, the aftermath of the Watergate scandal and Richard Nixon’s resignation was an important and productive time. The White House controversy was so systemic, and the political fallout was so dramatic, that policymakers agreed to create all kinds of new limits and guardrails intended to prevent future presidential abuses, while trying to restore public confidence in the wake of a governmental crisis.

Presidents serving in the post-Watergate era didn’t always appreciate these restrictions, but they recognized the legal restraints — up until very recently.

Take the Presidential Records Act, for example. The post-Watergate law was created to force presidents to turn over all their records to the National Archivers, as part of a larger effort to combat corruption and ensure White House transparency. Last week, Donald Trump’s team unilaterally decided it doesn’t think the Presidential Records Act is constitutional and that it no longer intends to comply with the 48-year-old law.

It was a step down a familiar path. The New York Times published a memorable analysis on this in January:

From the opening days of his second term, President Trump took aim at Watergate’s ethical checkpoints as if in a shooting gallery. First, he fired 17 inspectors general, a job established in the Watergate era to ferret out waste, fraud and abuse in government. He also fired the head of the Office of Special Counsel, an independent agency created by legislation in 1978 to protect government whistle-blowers. Then he fired the director of the Office of Government Ethics, created around the same time to guard against financial conflicts of interest by top government officials. And he has used the Justice Department and the F.B.I. as political tools, roles they worked to shed after Watergate.

By this measure, Americans are watching an era come to a rapid and painful end. A half-century ago, policymakers responded to a corrupt, power-hungry Republican president by establishing an ethical framework that proved quite effective, until another corrupt, power-hungry Republican president decided that the framework was getting in the way of his authoritarian-style ambitions, and a GOP-led Congress decided to let him do as he pleases.

It’s tempting to think the United States can do what it did before, learning similar lessons and rebuilding the guardrails after Trump’s term ends. If Nixon’s downfall opened the door to sweeping ethics breakthroughs, what’s to say Trump’s eventual departure from the White House won’t create a similar opportunity?

The answer is electoral: At the start of 1975, in the first Congress after Nixon resigned in disgrace, there were 60 Senate Democrats and 292 House Democrats (roughly two-thirds of the chamber). The party wanted to impose post-Watergate reforms, and the legislative lifts were easy.

I have no idea what’ll happen in the 2026 and 2028 elections, but it would take comparable Democratic majorities to respond to the Trump era the way Congress responded to Nixon decades ago.

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