President of the United States is deeply on edge, seething with anger and feeling increasingly

isolated. A special prosecutor's subpoenas and indictments have gripped the White House with fear

and fueled it with suspicion. President rants about his enemies, who he says are out to get him.

At the same time, he rages at members of his own cabinet, bitter that they are not doing

enough to protect him. He doesn't know who he can trust anymore. He lashes out at the media,

who he has deemed the enemy of decent Americans. His aides are increasingly worried about his volatile,

erratic behavior and fear his mental instability will impair his ability to govern.

The fits of rage and bouts of paranoia are worse than the evenings as he wanders the West Wing,

talking to the framed pictures of his predecessors hanging on the darkened walls.

President Trump in 2018? Nope, that's a portrait of Richard Nixon in the dark hours before he resigned

from the presidency, drawn largely from Bob Woodwards and Karl Bernstein's The Final Days.

They're riveting behind the scenes account of Nixon's fall from office.

But it bears a remarkable resemblance to a similarly brooding and paranoid Donald Trump

depicted in a recent Washington Post story. That last scene of a Nixon in the darkened halls of

the White House, talking to the portraits as it were, was one of the most haunting images of

the 35th president's final hours before he became the first chief executive to resign from office.

And so for Watergate junkies, talking to the portraits entered the lexicon,

in a vacuative way of describing the high and mighty,

brought low by their own tragic flaws and losing their grip on reality.

This week on Skull Duggery's Buried Treasure, talking to the portraits.

I'm Dan Clydeman, Editor in Chief of Yahoo News.

And I'm Michael Isagov, Chief Investigative Correspondent for Yahoo News.

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