The headline running across the Honolulu Star-Bulletin’s front page on Aug. 9, 1974, quoting the new president, Gerald Ford, summed it up: “Our Nightmare is Over.”

Although Ford was referring to the entire Watergate scandal with a White House stocked with criminals and a president caught on audio tape betraying the public trust, the nightmare itself was the end of the Nixon presidency.

Richard Nixon the year before became the only GOP presidential candidate to win Hawaii’s electoral votes. Later, Ronald Reagan would become just the second.

There is no chance the current GOP president even comes close to winning the vote in Hawaii; in fact, there is an argument to be made that a Trump presidency is damaging Hawaii’s Republican Party even more.

Looking at the state Legislature in 1973, before Nixon resigned: The Hawaii GOP had 16 House members and eight senators. By 1979, there were nine GOP senators and seven Republicans in the state House. Today there are only five GOP members holding legislative seats in the 76-member body.

In Congress, in the next election after Watergate, Republicans lost 48 seats in the House and five in the Senate, and the Democrats controlled the House until 1994.

Nixon left with a 24 percent approval rating. It must be an unspoken fear for Hawaii’s few remaining GOP supporters to see that just 32 percent of Americans polled approve of how Trump is handling his job as president, while 63 percent disapprove.

The Pew Research Center poll released Thursday sets a new low for Trump. By way of comparison, shortly after his impeachment, President Bill Clinton has a 73 percent approval rating.

For Trump, however, his tax bill has created an economic landscape so poisonous that, if passed into law, will create deficits so deep that Congress will be forced for decades to make cuts to balance the budget.

As The New York Times reported last week: “Speaker Paul D. Ryan and other Republicans are beginning to express their big dreams publicly, vowing that next year they will move on to changes in Medicare and Social Security.”

The hope is to backtrack on staples of American life since the days of Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson and take money away from Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare.

The irony or just crassness of talking about taking money away from the nation’s poor, sick and elderly, after just cutting taxes for corporations and the rich, will not happen without repercussions.

The Times quotes bipartisan financial experts who say that even if the tax cuts do result in economic growth envisioned by the GOP congressional tax-cutters, the plan will still result in an increased $1 trillion deficit over 10 years.

Deficits hurt the national economy, and weaken America’s foreign trading position. To cure that, the GOP will have to work on the deficit they just created. Florida Republican Marco Rubio last week may have just showed the GOP’s long-term goal by saying, according to The New York Times, “tax cuts were just the first step; the next is to reshape Social Security and Medicare for future retirees.”

Defending that scheme will be how the Hawaii GOP goes from five to none.

Richard Borreca writes on politics on Sundays. Reach him at 808onpolitics@gmail.com.