At the time, I was covering the hearings for The Washington Post. My front-page account, headlined “Public figures stunned at disclosure of tape recording,” reported its secret installation, to Nixon’s dismay and embarrassment.

Today, former president Donald Trump is ensnared in a similar quandary. Another White House insider, Cassidy Hutchinson, a close aide to Trump’s former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, testified Tuesday. Relating an account told to her by then-White House Deputy Chief of Staff Tony Ornato, she told what went on in Trump’s egregious behavior during the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection against the Capitol. She said he had tried to get to join the rioters at the Capitol, to the point that he wrestled with his Secret Service driver for the steering wheel of the presidential limousine to get there, but failed.

Anonymous Secret Service sources, however, have told the committee they stand ready to refute aspects of the account, but none has challenged the basic point that Trump wanted to get to the scene of the insurrection and was deeply frustrated when the Secret Service wouldn’t let him.

In this and other attempts to overturn his 2020 defeat for reelection by Joe Biden, Hutchinson related how Trump demonstrated his determination to maintain his own political stature.

His efforts resembled in a bizarre manner Nixon’s earlier drive to recover from the Watergate fiasco that began with the bungled burglary of the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee. Together, the two events stand out as reminders of how close we have come to losing our democracy to the whims and wishes of two self-centered politicians.

The unusual sixth hearing by the House select committee investigating the mob attack on the Capitol underscored how Trump’s personal behavior was central to the case built against him with meticulous and tenacious zeal in the first five hearings.

For once, the House committee was not dominated by any one member embraced by the sound of his or her own voice, as too often can be the case in this era of social media excess. Rather, it has been a model for public service of fact-finding by Congress, and the best efforts of the American press, itself sometimes too big for its collective britches.

In any event, the burden of breaking Donald Trump’s hold on the Republican Party, and in the end the survival of our cherished two-party system, depends on the Grand Old Party regaining its allegiance to its conservative principles, beyond the narrow and deceptive designs of one false prophet.

Jules Witcover’s latest book is “The American Vice Presidency: From Irrelevance to Power,” published by Smithsonian Books. You can respond to this column at juleswitcover@comcast.net.