If Donald Trump hoped to make Americans feel nostalgic about Richard Nixon, he's succeeded. Those were the days of relatively modest abuse of presidential power, comparatively speaking, which Nixon at least felt constrained to engage in discreetly. They were days when merely sporadic acts abusing democracy sufficed to generate a bipartisan consensus that the president was unfit for the presidency. They were, in short, the good old days.

Shortly after operatives directed by Nixon's top aides burglarized and bugged the Democrats' headquarters in the Watergate Hotel in June 1972 and Nixon commenced organizing the cover-up, press secretary Ron Ziegler famously dismissed Watergate as a "third-rate burglary" unworthy of serious attention. For 50 years, we've mocked the "third-rate burglary" line. But in the last week alone, Trump 2.0 has shown that we've been unfair to Ziegler and that, in retrospect, he was off by a few notches. Next to Trump's openly contemptuous assault on American democracy, the Watergate scandal looks fifth-rate at best.

Credit him for brazenness; Trump's been pledging to use his power to exact "retribution" against his political opponents for several years, and he's making good on his pledge. Upon taking office, he and his team scoured the federal government for individuals whose obeisance they doubted, firing them. He's terminated the security protection of former public servants who opposed him, even ones who've been under constant death threats. After former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a Trump critic, noted that Trump was misusing the Justice Department against his opponents, Trump threatened Christie with a criminal investigation, a perplexing way of disputing Christie's point. Trump's FBI director raided the home of former National Security Adviser John Bolton, another vocal Trump critic.

After conservative activist Charlie Kirk was murdered, evidently by a deranged young man whose derangements appeared diverse, ABC talk show host Jimmy Kimmel, who loathes Trump and whom Trump loathes, commented that Trump supporters had devoted considerable time arguing that the apparent assassin was not one of them, in order to make the case that this was a "leftist" hit on Kirk for which "the left" should be blamed. Kimmel's wasn't an attack on Kirk but rather a commentary on the state of American politics, with which one could agree or not.

MAGA World chose "not." Indeed, they demanded that Kimmel be kicked off the air. Trump proclaimed that media outlets that criticized him too much should lose the right to broadcast. "All they do is hit Trump. They're licensed. They're not allowed to do that," said the guy who claimed he wanted to stop the "weaponization" of government against free speech. "They give me only bad publicity or press," he maintained. "I mean, they're getting a license. I would think maybe their license should be taken away."

You didn't have to be Albert Einstein to get the message. The Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission was less subtle than Don Corleone in delivering that message to ABC's parent company and its business partner, both with multibillion-dollar transactions in the pipeline that would require FCC approval, letting them know what they'd better do if they didn't want to be financially garroted. "We can do this the hard way," he smirked, "or we can do this the easy way."

Before you could say, "How high do I jump?" Kimmel was gone. Now everyone on any platform that interacts with the federal government must worry about criticizing Trump.

Just the way he likes it.

Victorious, Trump doubled down, firing the U.S. Attorney in Virginia he'd recently appointed hoping he would indict New York Attorney General Letitia James, who successfully sued Trump for fraud. "(He said) we had no case. ... There is a GREAT CASE," Trump instructed Attorney General Pam Bondi in a memo he accidentally disclosed, demanding that she also promptly bring criminal cases against former FBI Director James Comey and U.S. Sen. Adam Schiff.

This is just in the last week. Trump supporters scoff that references to Mussolini or tin-pot tyrants or would-be dictators are overstated.

They're not.

Jeff Robbins' latest book, "Notes From the Brink: A Collection of Columns about Policy at Home and Abroad," is available now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books and Google Play. Robbins, a former assistant United States attorney and United States delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, was chief counsel for the minority of the United States Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. An attorney specializing in the First Amendment, he is a longtime columnist for the Boston Herald, writing on politics, national security, human rights and the Mideast.

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