Jonathan Bernstein, Columnist

Republicans Must Save This Presidency. Now.

This was not the Saturday Night Massacre. But it added to an unsustainable amount of chaos.

January 31, 2017 at 12:59 PM UTC

Jonathan Bernstein is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering politics. A former professor of political science at the University of Texas at San Antonio, he wrote A Plain Blog About Politics.

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Photographer: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg

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To begin with: This was not the Saturday Night Massacre.

Donald Trump fired a holdover acting attorney general, who would have been gone soon anyway once Trump's nominated choice is confirmed and sworn in, because she would not support a Trump policy in court. Richard Nixon, in October 1973, ordered his own attorney general to fire a special prosecutor who was investigating the president, his White House, and campaign staff; the attorney general resigned rather than fire the prosecutor, and then Nixon fired the next-in-line, after which the third-in-line was sworn in as the new acting attorney general and carried out the president's orders.