In the 1976 political drama All the President’s Men, Robert Redford’s Bob Woodward meets the secretive FBI source, Deep Throat, in a parking garage to ask him what he knows about the Watergate break-in. Deep Throat – in real life, the FBI deputy director Mark Felt – is ominous and taciturn, refusing to say all that he knows. “I have to do this my way,” he tells Redford. “You tell me what you know, and I’ll confirm.” But he offers a blunt assessment of the inner workings of the Nixon administration. “Forget the myths that the media has created about the White House,” Deep Throat tells Woodward. “The truth is these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.”
Few moments in history, including the Watergate scandal, have done so much to puncture the dignified mystique of American government as Donald Trump’s frantic, cynical and preposterous attempts to hang on to power after losing the 2020 election. The indictment against him related that effort, unsealed on Tuesday by the office of special counsel Jack Smith, charges Trump with engaging in three conspiracies: to defraud the United States in seeking to overturn the election, to obstruct the government in seeking to derail the January 6 proceedings, and perhaps most meaningfully, to deprive American voters of their right to have their votes counted. The charges are serious; the violence was deadly. But every one of the indictment’s 45 pages evokes Deep Throat’s words: these are not very bright guys.
