Princeton historian Sean Wilentz predicts that Donald Trump will get away with his unprecedented firing of FBI Director James Comey. The current crisis differs from Watergate for a number of reasons, but especially because of the press.
In 1973, dogged reporting by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward of the Washington Post kept the Watergate story alive, after most news outlets had dropped it. Once their reporting gained traction, the rest of the press picked up the scandal and kept up the pressure on the Nixon White House. Today, Trump can count on the fervent support of propaganda operations that Nixon could only have prayed for, including the unabashedly polemical Fox News and Breitbart News, as well as the countless bloggers (and, for that matter, Russian-controlled cyberbots) pumping out pro-Trump propaganda.
As I write this, one Fox commentator after another is parroting the White House