I suppose it's not very original to suggest that if today's media environment existed back in the 1970s, Richard Nixon would have survived the Watergate affair, and we never would have had a President Gerald Ford.

I'm going to go a step further, however, and say that we probably never would have had a President Ronald Reagan either. Why? Well, if Richard Nixon had his way in 1972, Vice President Spiro Agnew would have been dropped from the Republican ticket in favor of John Connally, a conservative Texas Democrat (and longtime ally of Lyndon Johnson) who had defected to the Republican Party early in Nixon's first term. Nixon liked and respected Connally; he neither liked nor respected Agnew. But Nixon grudgingly kept Agnew aboard because of his popularity with certain elements of the Republican base. Like Trump, Agnew affected a sort of anti-intellectual smugness, with a knack for crafting memorable insults and catchphrases.

Bring today's media environment back to the 1970s, and Agnew likely survives the bribery scandal that felled him a year before Nixon went down. Playing the smug victim card, sitting Vice President Agnew is the early front-runner for the 1976 Republican nomination over Ronald Reagan, who despite his considerable talent, cannot easily flank Agnew from the right as he did against Ford.