Just like Nixon, Trump is pushing conspiracy theories to counter the legitimate investigation

that is taking place. Trump is accusing the "Deep State" and the "Establishment" and the "Swamp" and the "Crooked Media" of conspiring against him.

Just like Nixon, Trump's trying to discredit an investigation into the real conspiracy: the one his team engaged in with Russia.

But Trump's crimes make Nixon's pale in comparison.

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/06/17/trump-watergate-and-how-conspiracy-theories-get-made-215274

For all the similarities between President Donald Trump’s Russiagate scandal (or, as I prefer to call it, Onion Dome) and Watergate — the special counsels; the congressional hearings; the talk of obstruction of justice and secret tapes — there’s one parallel that is getting less attention.

In Watergate as in Onion Dome, defenders of the president plunged deep into conspiracy theory to explain away a growing body of evidence pointing to serious White House wrongdoing. Today, Trump surrogates deny Russian interference in the election and assert that U.S. intelligence agencies — portentously (and inaccurately) called the Deep State — are hoping to overturn the election results through leaks and fake news. And though it has largely been forgotten, some Nixon acolytes during and after Watergate pushed a very similar claim: that the CIA, the Pentagon or other entrenched government interests secretly conspired to oust Nixon for their own reasons, even as the media trumpeted a phony narrative about the president’s guilt. Tracing the history of those Watergate-era claims — their origins as a diversionary cover story, their intrinsic appeal to loyalists who were in denial about the scandal’s gravity, their after-life among radical skeptics on the ideological fringes of public debate — may help illuminate similar thinking of those determined today to see Onion Dome as a plot by Trump’s enemies to maintain the status quo.


The claims that Nixon was done in by the CIA or other vested interests began soon after hirelings of his reelection team — the Committee to Re-Elect the President, later nicknamed CREEP — were arrested breaking into the Watergate building on June 17, 1972. With the full scope of Nixon’s involvement in Watergate still unknown by the public, speculation about the break-in ran wild. As information streamed out — from the 1973 Senate investigation, the trials of the burglars, the reporting of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of The Washington Post and other journalists — keeping track of it all became bewildering; in November 1973, Edward J. Epstein and John Berendt laid out in Esquire 43 theories of what happened. Among Nixon defenders, the most popular theories, which fingered the CIA as having masterminded the break-in, began with an unlikely source: Richard Nixon himself.


SNIP

From the sidelines, baroque extensions of the theory grew. It was a widely held tenet among Nixon’s defenders that Democrats and liberal journalists were hyping Watergate, which they thought was a rogue operation and an inconsequential crime, to weaken the president; on the right, the inquiry was routinely called, metaphorically, a “coup.” But some on the right went further, alleging a literal coup engineered by the CIA or, in other versions, the Pentagon. In National Review, CIA officer Miles Copeland spun out a narrative in which McCord, still loyal to the agency despite having moved to Nixon’s reelection campaign, “took Hunt and Liddy into a trap … putting the White House’s clowns out of business.” Others posited that Hunt was the double agent.