Most people think that President Richard Nixon was brought down by Bernstein and Woodward — those intrepid reporters at The Washington Post. They weren’t the only reporters on the story, so that’s a simplification. But the truth is that it wasn’t any group of reporters who caused Nixon to resign from the presidency. If you had to pick a man, it would be Mark Felt — better known as Deep Throat. He had real power, which he used brilliantly. And his reason for going after the president tells us a lot about the political climate that we now live in.

In 1972, Mark Felt was Associate Director of the FBI. Although his motives in All the President’s Men were claimed to be patriotic, his actual allegiance was to the FBI itself. Felt didn’t like what he saw as meddling in the agency by the Nixon administration. He was almost 60 years old when he started leaking information, so it’s hard to see him as the idealistic leaker that Chelsea Manning was. If I were Donald Trump, I’d be afraid.

Let’s remember what brought down President Nixon. It wasn’t the break-in of the DNC office at the Watergate complex. That would have been pathetic enough a thing. He was brought down because of his part in trying to cover-up this second-rate crime. We know that presidents are involved with far worse crimes all the time. Why didn’t Ronald Reagan and George H W Bush get indicted about the far worse crimes involved in the Iran-Contra affair? Because the bureaucratic infrastructure wasn’t out to get them. Indeed, both men were protected by Oliver North.

Trump’s Antagonizes the Powerful

The Trump administration has gone out of its way to antagonize most of the US government’s bureaucratic infrastructure. That’s especially true of the most dangerous part of it: the intelligence community, which has show little reluctance to use its power. I wonder if Michael Flynn wouldn’t still be Trump’s National Security Advisor if it weren’t for the intelligence community’s distaste for Trump and his minions.

The truth is that I doubt one could be President of the United State without commonly breaking the law. And even if it were possible, Trump would not be the president who managed the feat. In fact, it takes no power of imagination to substitute Trump for Nixon when he said, “When the President does it, that means that it is not illegal.”

So it seems certain that the Trump administration will break the law. Trump seems to think that the president is a dictator. And there are thousands — perhaps hundreds of thousands — of government officials who would be thrilled to get rid of him. Add to that the fact that the Republican Party itself would be happy to get rid of Trump — so long as the alternative would be Mike Pence. And you end up with a very dangerous situation for Donald Trump.

Trump Doesn’t Have Much Power

I’m not saying that Trump will go away any time soon. For one thing, he and his staff are so incompetent that it’s possible they won’t be able to get enough done to break any laws. It may just be four long years of embarrassing tweets and nothing more — other than signing every legislative wet dream the Republicans in Congress have ever had.

But Trump doesn’t seem much interested in wielding real power. His constant boasting show that he’s more interested in looking tough than actually being it. And his idea of looking tough is that of a third grade boy. The truth is that if you lead a country that has a military roughly the size of all the other countries combined, no one would question your toughness. Trump’s boasts seem to indicate a kind of insecurity on his own part.

Trump hasn’t made friends with old enemies. The Russians have the same relationship with us now as they ever did. But Trump has made enemies he didn’t need to. And those enemies could be his ultimate downfall.

During last year’s primary, my father told me that he wasn’t too concerned about Trump, because like all other presidents, he would surround himself with smart, knowledgeable people. I assume that Charles Krauthammer was saying this. Whenever my father has what seems like a thought-out political opinion, it usually means he is just channeling Krauthammer. (To get an idea of what I think of the hypocrite man, read, Republicans Are in the Majority Again — So Krauthammer Is Against the Filibuster Again.) It was a hard argument to counter at the time. I did, but I doubt that it meant much. Today, it is impossible to deny: the Trump administration is as incompetent as he is.

Perhaps if Trump had any experience in the government at all, he might have surrounded himself with nominally competent people. But the truth is that Trump ran a campaign that everyone who knew anything about politics told him should have resulted in his resounding loss. Instead, he’s now President of the United States. As I like to remind people: the only real job of a politician is to get elected and to win re-election. Trump has won election, despite being a total nightmare in every way imaginable. Why should he run the country in any other way?

Why Should Trump Change?

That, in fact, was the argument I made at the time: why should he change what worked for him so well in the primary once he became president? There was a comeback to that, which my father used: presidents always have. Of course, that’s not even true. It’s just that people in the United States have developed what I call casual cynicism. They’ve come to accept the unqualified as a give.

So when Obama, for example, made Eric Holder attorney general, it was no big deal. Holder had spent his entire career defending the very people who brought us the Great Recession. No problem! The same thing was true when Obama made Mary Jo White head of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). But at least you could count on Obama to nominate lawyers to do work involving the law. Going back to Reagan, Alan Greenspan may have been a wacky pick for Fed chair, but at least he was nominally an economist.

Trump doesn’t care about any of that. And can we blame him? If Mary Jo White can head the SEC, why can’t Betsy DeVos be the Secretary of Education? Just because White had the superficial credentials to head the SEC didn’t mean she would actually do the job. How is it a big deal that DeVos wants to destroy public education when it wasn’t a big deal that Obama put a woman in charge of policing the securities industry that the securities industry itself would have picked?

Incompetent Is as Incompetent Picks

The only thing that is different is that Trump has surrounded himself with people who are so incompetent that they won’t even be good at doing the evil things that they want to do. That doesn’t mean that they won’t do terrible damage. They will! But there isn’t anything categorically different in what Trump is doing compared to what Obama did. In fact, the administrations of the two men are totally in keeping with who they are.

Obama surrounded himself with smart, nominally competent people who didn’t see anything fundamentally wrong with the nation. Given that they were both fully vested in the status quo, their competence didn’t matter that much. After all, they headed institutions that were filled with competent people who knew how the job used to be done.

Trump has surrounded himself with dull, incompetent people who see fundamental problems with the country. Of course, the fundamental problems they see are mostly pure fantasy. But they do want to do something about these problems. Mostly, however, the courts and Congress will stop them from doing anything important unless it involves giving more money to the rich.

In this way, we should be grateful to Donald Trump. A regular Republican would have surrounded himself with people who would have been better at furthering their evil plans. Trump isn’t getting that, as we have already seen with the Muslim travel ban. If Trump had an Obama-level crew, the ban might have been finessed to the point where it was legal. In this case, at least, incompetence trumps villainy.

The Down Side of Republican Incompetence

The place where this will all matter will be in the event of a catastrophe. And this will be the case. There will be lots of “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job” moments under Trump — both big and small. And the villainy of Trump’s (and the entire Republican Party’s) plan will cause untold damage to the people of America and the world.

But there was never any question but that Trump would surround himself with people as dull and incompetent as he is. How could it have been otherwise? How could a man of Trump’s towering incompetence tell the difference between the competent and the incompetent?