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With new parallels between the Russia investigation and Watergate popping up almost every week — the latest being White House counsel Donald McGahn cooperating with the special counsel — it’s important to remember what actually happened during Watergate.

One way I’ve done this is by listening to the fantastic Slowburn podcast. The first season looked at what it was like to live through Watergate and reminded us that some things that seemed important at the time are now mostly forgotten. (The second season, on the Clinton impeachment, is equally fascinating.)

Another good reminder was a recent New York Times op-ed by Michael Conway and Jon Marshall which argued that our memories of bipartisan cooperation during the Watergate scandal are actually very wrong.

In fact, Republicans worked hard to defend Richard Nixon, and much like they do today with Trump, frequently revised their statements in support of him when new facts emerged. Most Republicans — and many conservative Democrats — opposed impeachment well into the summer of 1974, more than a year after White House counsel John Dean testified against the president.

House Minority Leader Gerald Ford (R-MI), who later succeeded Nixon as president, even called the investigation a “political witch hunt.”

As Conway and Marshall write:

After it was revealed in July 1973 that Mr. Nixon had secretly taped conversations, Mr. Ford said he found nothing wrong with the president’s practices. Republican Senator John Tower of Texas later warned Congress not to get caught up in “the hysteria of Watergate.”

Most congressional Republicans rallied around Mr. Nixon when the White House released edited transcripts of those tapes in April 1974 that showed Mr. Nixon scheming with his aides. As the House Judiciary Committee began debating possible impeachment in July, Representative Delbert Latta of Ohio said the evidence failed to prove Mr. Nixon’s direct involvement in Watergate.

It wasn’t until the “smoking gun” tape was released — just a few days before Nixon resigned — that Republicans began to finally turn against the president.

But that tape, which proved Nixon had ordered his staff to cover-up the Watergate crimes, wasn’t really the smoking gun we remember today. Ever since Dean had testified a year earlier, there was more than enough solid proof that Nixon was guilty of both abuse of power and obstruction of justice. The tape was the tipping point, however, because it proved to many Republicans that the president had lied.

Until those last few weeks, most Republicans in Congress still defended Nixon.

This doesn’t prove that today’s Republicans will eventually turn on Trump. But it does suggest that loyalty to a president of one’s own party isn’t guaranteed. Events matter and it takes just one to sometimes change the entire politics of the situation.

There’s still a lot we don’t know about Donald Trump, his campaign’s involvement with Russia and his attempts to stop the investigation. But like during Watergate, there’s already plenty of evidence that the president obstructed justice and abused the power of his office. The equivalent “smoking gun” might be Trump’s prior knowledge of the Trump Tower meeting with a Russian agent. Or it might be proof that Trump is deeply in debt to Russian oligarchs or committed money laundering crimes. Or it might be something else entirely.

The biggest difference, of course, between Watergate and now is that Republicans currently control both houses of Congress. During Watergate, it was Democrats who held both chambers.

That’s what makes the 2018 midterm elections so important. If Democrats win control of either house, they can use their subpoena power to push the investigation deeper. What they find — and what they make public — might go a long way to changing minds.

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Charles Franklin, the director of the Marquette Law School Poll, shares this chart of President Richard Nixon’s approval rate over the course of his shortened presidency:

Some quick observations:

• Nixon was pretty popular through the first term, nearly always over 50% approval.
• The most striking fact — at least when looking with today’s perspective — is that his approval among Democrats was fairly strong, almost always in the 40s.
• Republican approval averaged in the 80s throughout his first term.

Had Nixon left office at the start of his second term, he would have gone out with a strikingly high 67% approval rate. But over the next nine months Nixon experienced one of the sharpest drops in presidential approval in history. Franklin finds his approval plummeted roughly four percent points per month from January 1973 to October 1973, from 67% to 30%.

Although Nixon’s approval rate declined a little more during 1974 until his resignation in August, nearly all of the decline took place in 1973 during a stream of damaging news stories about the Watergate burglary. By the time of the Saturday Night Massacre on October 20, 1973, Nixon’s approval had already reached a “steady state” low point and barely budged again until he left office.

Almost nothing during Nixon’s remaining months — transcripts from White House tapes and the start of impeachment proceedings — moved his overall approval ratings. His support among Republicans was about 54%, independents at 25% and Democrats at 15%.

Only the information made public during those nine months of 1973 moved his approval rate. After that, nothing else seemed to matter. Everyone who could be persuaded had been persuaded.

A key takeaway: It was during the Senate Watergate hearings, in which the evidence was formally laid out, when Nixon lost most Americans. The equivalent has not yet happened in the Mueller investigation. When the Mueller report is finally released (and perhaps trials begin for those indicted) that may be the time when Trump begins to bleed support from his own party.

Another key point: Nixon still had the approval of roughly half of Republicans at the bitter end.

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In the aftermath of President Trump’s disastrous news conference with Vladimir Putin — some would say treasonous — no Trump administration officials have tendered their resignations to protest the president’s blanket dismissal of U.S. intelligence findings that Russia interfered with U.S. elections.

It’s remarkable considering the severity of the offense.

On the latest episode of Political Wire Conversations, Chris Riback asked former NATO Ambassador Nicholas Burns a bonus question for his newsletter subscribers why American public officials don’t resign more often:

What an extraordinary question. We don’t have a tradition of it. In other countries, Britain is one, there is a tradition when public officials disagree on an issue of great consequence. Perhaps even ethical and moral consequence, that they resign. We don’t appear to have that tradition. Our tradition is you serve. You serve at the pleasure of the president, and the Executive branch. You serve because the public good is enhanced by your service, even if you disagree, you still must serve. That’s more the tradition, but they’re exceptions.

A friend of mine, Brady Kiesling, American Foreign Service Officer, resigned in opposition to the Iraq war in 2003. Wrote a book about it, was very vocal about it. I thought he had every right to do that. And it’s a struggle for people inside government when you contest an idea, privately, behind the scenes in government. And when you end up on the losing side, you’re sometimes asked to go out and support it publicly. That’s the nature of public service.

So your question leads to this fine line. What am I willing to do in service to my country? And what am I not willing to do? And I think everybody goes into politics, or public service, at any level, state, city-state, federal, international, has to have that question firmly in mind. Are there things that I’m not willing to do for the government? Of course there are, and so you’ve always got to keep that in mind.

The complete inaction of Trump administration officials over the last week would suggest that most have never even really thought about it.