If Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be a 12-hour news story.

                                                                                                               Vice President J.D. Vance

You have to hand it to J.D. For once he was right.  Right, but not in the way he meant it. If Watergate—the break-in, the Ellsberg break in, the cover-up including using government agencies to obstruct a criminal investigation, payment of hush money to keep participants from revealing what they knew, suborning perjury, all with the knowledge of the president of the United States—if all of that happened today, it might well be a 12-hour news story.

Because something worse would come along during those 12 hours to push the Watergate story off the front page and off cable and off X and other social media. We’ve gotten used to that during the time we’re living in with a mentally damaged man filling the presidency. Every day brings a new scandal or outrage, conflicts of interest, corrupt dealings, undeserved pardons, senseless firings of dedicated public servants, illegal wars of choice, murder on the high seas, racist comments and actions, extortion of private institutions and on and on.

For the record, Watergate involved a President of the United States who was guilty of obstruction of justice, orchestrating a cover-up that included a laundry list of federal and state crimes. “Ultimately,” according to the Levin Center for Oversight and Democracy, “48 people were convicted of crimes related to the Watergate scandal including conspiracy, obstruction of justice, perjury, burglary, wiretapping, and distributing illegal campaign literature. Twenty corporations pled guilty to making illegal campaign contributions.”

What Vance also didn’t mean is that many of us have become inured to the erosion of public ethics and obedience to laws because we have so often seen, especially lately, how leading figures in our government, including in the White House, have treated ethics and the law with contempt. It’s a sad comment on how far we’ve fallen since Watergate.

And, by the way, thanks to the Supreme Court’s ruling in Trump v. United States, Trump and any other President who comes along, would be immune from prosecution for any illegal, but official, presidential action. So, Richard Nixon might not have been vulnerable to criminal prosecution at all. Unfortunately for him he had a different Supreme Court with different notions about how a President should comport himself.

So, yeah, as my son would say, Vance was right. It probably would be a 12-hour news story. But there’s nothing funny about that.