You need to get some perspective. The US hasn't even reached 1970s level of chaos yet, and basic disagreements about political goals are not a basis for arrest in a functioning democracy.
Calling for the arrest of the opposing party is the thing that is destabilizing this country. "Why won't you people just shut up and get in the boxcars you damn insurrectionists! We says you guilty of crimes to be determined at a later date, therefore you don't get to participate in the election."
There seems some confusion here with what I posted. I was referring to two possibilities. Let me elaborate these: One possibility is that the former President, who has been indicted on 91 felony counts, and is attempting to to avoid prosecution by running for president again, will be found guilty and go to prison either before or after voters reject him in November. The other possibility is that he will not be convicted before the election and somehow manages to get himself elected this November. In this case, if one is to believe his rhetoric, and he does what he says he will do, the nation will be transformed during a second Trump Presidency into a one-party, de facto autocracy. And too, there are still other less likely possibilities. Regardless, what eventually happens will, despite Donald Trump's ridiculous protestations and projections of his own crimes onto others, have only very superficially anything to do with politics and instead everything to do with whether or not Trump succeeds in avoiding the rule of law being applied to himself.
Your knowledge of the Nixon era does not agree with my first hand knowledge and observations of that 1970s period in U.S. history. (I was in my early 30s then working at the University of California's Los Alamos Laboratory, and I remember the Watergate era as clearly as though it were yesterday.)
The Watergate affair was very different from what is happening today. There was no insurrection and no chaos. Nixon did not try to pull off a bloody and violent coup. Government processes remained orderly and adult-like. There was no shouting and name calling. Both sides respected the rule of law --- though President Nixon did have his on peculiar and self-serving interpretation of Presidential power. President Nixon, who knew nothing of the Watergate escapade in advance, tried to coverup the involvement of his administration. It was his attempted cover-up that got him in trouble with
both political parties. The Republicans at first tried to disassociate the Watergate break-in with anything going on in the White House. This became increasingly difficult after John Dean, a young Republican attorney in Nixon's administration, told the truth about Nixon's involvement in the cover-up and incriminated himself in the process. (He later did time for his role and ended up as somewhat of a national hero.) It was discovered that tapes of conversations in the Oval Office existed. Nixon tried to claim executive privilege over the tapes. Leon Jaworski, the Independent Counsel appointed by the DOJ, brought Nixon's claim of privilege to the Court. The Supreme Court quickly ruled unanimously that executive privilege could not be asserted to cover-up potential crimes, and the tapes would therefore have to be released to the bipartisan Senate committee investigating the Watergate break in. Once the tapes were reviewed it became clear that Nixon had committed felonies. Republican friends went to Nixon and told him that he was going to be both impeached and convicted by a two-thirds majority in the Senate consisting of both Democrats
and Republicans. It is then that Nixon resigned, Gerry Ford became President and subsequently pardoned Nixon, a move that was widely credited with costing Ford the Presidency when he later ran on his own. (Spiro Agnew, Nixon's original V.P., had only months before resigned over having been caught taking kickbacks in Maryland. As a result, Gerry Ford had replaced Agnew as V.P. by application of the 25th Amendment. So at the time of Nixon's resignation Ford was ready to assume the Presidency.)
There are few similarities between Watergate and what is in progress in the country right now as I write this is. In Nixon's case, it took an investigation to uncover his crimes, and after he was found out, he stopped lying and quickly vacated the Oval Office.. In Donald Trump's case, however, he has done his law breaking largely in plain sight of millions of Americans, and even after thorough investigation he continues to lie and pretend he has done nothing wrong. Millions of his own followers who obviously know he's lying, because they have witnessed his actions and words with their own eyes and ears and can not, therefore, escape the terrible inconsistency between what Trump does and what he says. Even so, his foolish followers still make excuses for him and don't seem to care that he is lying, nor do they seem to care that the existence of our democratic republic is threatened by him. This is a far cry from how members of Nixon's own party behaved when they learned he had participated in the cover-up of his administration's involvement in Watergate.
The Nixon affair and what is happening today have few parallels. There was little to no talk of an existential threat to the U.S. Democracy in Nixon's time, and the concepts of alternative facts, truthiness and fake electors had not occurred to anyone. So far as anyone knows, there was no involvement of a foreign country in U.S. domestic politics in Nixon time. It was the finding by The Watergate Committee and Jaworski that the President had committed felonies that ended Nixon's political career. He was either going to resign or be impeached and convicted. Those were his choices. Once his crimes were exposed, he did not resist the transfer of power to Ford, nor did he steal stacks of top secrete documents and claim he had declassified them. He did not launch an endless stream of meritless childish appeals, and he certainly did not insult and invent silly, childish names for the Judges that stood between him and the White House. He showed respect for Congress and the law, and he did not claim that the DOJ was being weaponized by the Democrats against him. Those were very different times not to be compared with the existential threat that confronts us all today.
