Fifty years ago, on Aug. 8, 1974, President Richard Nixon told a national television audience that he would resign the following day. Nixon’s announcement, while historic, was not unexpected. Investigations into his role in the bungled Watergate break-in two years earlier had revealed a pattern of abuses of power—with shocking details of break-ins and dirty tricks captivating the nation during the televised Senate Watergate Committee hearings in the summer of 1973.

Members of Nixon’s staff had confessed to an array of covert unethical (and sometimes illegal) tactics they had used to ensure the president’s reelection in 1972. A member of the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP), Donald Segretti, was open about his work of sabotaging the campaigns of Democratic candidates by disseminating false information. Testifying before the Watergate Committee on Oct. 3, 1973, he admitted that he had undertaken “political tricks” and espionage on behalf of Nixon’s campaign, including creating fake committees and printing propaganda, to foil the campaigns of Democratic candidates such as Senator Edmund Muskie.

And Segretti was clear about when and where he had learned these tricks: as a college student at the University of Southern California, where he had been part of a political association known as Trojans for Representative Government—a group that ended up producing a bunch of Nixon staffers who participated in the Watergate scandal.

While presidential elections have been marred by mudslinging since the early Republic, these USC alums deployed a particular type of dirty tricks: what became known as “ratf--king,” or the use of unscrupulous tactics to interfere with the campaigns of opponents. The tactics pioneered by members of Trojans for Representative Government and later CREEP set a precedent for the sort of organized political sabotage that has become commonplace today in a digital world, especially for Republicans.

The story of Trojans for Representative Government is rooted in USC student politics. Beginning in 1931, a fraternity, Theta Nu Epsilon, dominated USC student politics for decades. In 1948, several students formed their own opposition party, Free Greeks, which later changed its name to Trojans for Representative Government. Their goal was to usurp Theta Nu Epsilon as the leading political organization on campus by positioning itself as a voice for all students. They tried to draw a........

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