Echoes of Watergate as Trump flies to Middle East amid new Comey revelations
By James Hohmann May 19 at 11:19 AM
THE BIG IDEA: Donald Trump goes wheels up at 2:10 p.m. for Riyadh. His nine-day tour will then take him to Jerusalem, the West Bank, Rome, Brussels, and Sicily.
Walter Pincus, who has one of the longest memories in Washington, sees parallels between the president’s first foreign trip and a journey Richard Nixon took to the Middle East as Watergate consumed his presidency in June 1974. It came at the very time the Watergate special prosecutor was in court seeking the actual White House tapes of presidential conversations (do such tapes exist now?) and congressional committees were beginning to look into impeachment. “Back then, ironically, Nixon visited leaders in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Israel in an unsuccessful attempt to strengthen the ceasefire agreement that halted fighting in the Yom Kippur, Arab-Israeli war,” Walter writes for the Cipher Brief. “Nixon returned home to challenge and lose his Supreme Court argument over the tapes that set him down the path to resigning the presidency.”
Trying to look at the bright side, David Ignatius notes in his column that “domestic scandals can have the odd effect of encouraging diplomacy abroad”: “Nixon made major peace deals in the Middle East after the Watergate debacle began. But even so, that story didn’t end happily for Nixon or the United States.”
-- While many presidents have tried to use statesmanship abroad to distract from their problems at home, the Trump brand of diplomacy has some analysts worried that the tour might only make his troubles worse, Post diplomatic correspondents Anne Gearan and Carol Morello write in a preview of what to expect.
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So, wheels up is Mueller time! 
