For half a century, Watergate has been the quintessential American scandal, so much so that we frequently affix “-gate” to new episodes of official wrongdoing in an attempt to make it sound significant and sinister.
But what if, asked Vice President JD Vance, we consider Watergate no big deal? Or even better, why not decide that former President Richard Nixon, our pre-Trump model of corruption and abuse of office, was not the perpetrator of Watergate but its victim?
“I’m actually fascinated by Nixon as a character in history,” Vance said at an appearance this week at the Nixon Library in California. “I think that his historical legacy is enjoying a bit of a renaissance, but I think deservedly so. As I joked with Robert backstage, if Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be like a 12-hour news story. Like, the idea that it would have taken down a presidency is crazy.”
Rewriting history is a longtime hobby of American conservatives.
Vance continued: “And by the way, if you look at the story of how the deep state took down Richard Nixon, it’s not all that different from what the same groups of people, the same institutions tried to do to Donald Trump and the first Trump administration. There is a parallel.”
Rewriting history is a longtime hobby of American conservatives, both to absolve them of their sins and reshape the American mind to align with their values. For instance, the “Lost Cause” counternarrative of the Civil War, which portrays the Confederacy’s treasonous slavery advocates into noble men simply defending their homes, continues to this day, with the Trump administration renaming military bases and erecting statues to honor those traitors. And Trump has convinced much of his party to believe that the 2020 election was stolen from him and that the Jan. 6 insurrection was merely a largely peaceful protest carried out by true patriots.
Watergate has been part of this revisionist project since the day Nixon resigned the presidency. Nixon’s legal arguments against having to hand over Oval Office tapes to investigators, though unsuccessful at the time, became crucial to the development of the unitary executive theory, championed by former Vice President Dick Cheney, and the Roberts court’s conservative majority holds. Most recently, prominent figures on the right, including Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon and Christopher Rufo, have argued that Watergate was all a set-up by the “deep state” to frame Nixon, who was innocent. Vance has now joined their number.
Remember: Watergate was far more than just a break-in at Democratic Party headquarters in the Washington office/apartment complex that gave the scandal its name. The burglary merely led to the exposure of the rot within the Nixon administration: a mountain of criminal acts from money laundering to obstruction of justice to multiple additional break-ins to a shocking abuse of government power.
At one point, White House counsel John Dean, who later located his conscience and told the public what he had seen and done, penned a memo for other White House officials exploring “how we can use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies.” The White House tapes recorded Nixon personally committing criminal acts, including making a plan to order the CIA to quash the FBI’s investigation of the break-in at the Watergate (the so-called “smoking gun” recording).
In the end, dozens of people in Nixon’s administration and political orbit pled guilty or were convicted of crimes. Those sent to prison included the attorney general, the White House chief of staff and the president’s chief domestic policy adviser.
We’ll need a raft of post-Trump reforms beyond even what Congress passed after Nixon slinked away in disgrace.
In a twisted sense, Vance is almost right about the “deep state,” since he and other MAGA figures use that term to refer to civil servants who are loyal to the country rather than to whatever corrupt scheme President Donald Trump wants to recruit them for. But they didn’t frame Nixon; they exposed him. During Watergate, the president and his top aides pressed multiple government officials, including some appointed by Nixon himself, to do things they knew were illegal or unethical. Those officials simply refused; some, like Dean, went public.
That is similar to what happened in Trump’s first administration: Again and again, officials refused to go along with his corrupt schemes; some of them testified before Congress in his first impeachment or before the Jan. 6 committee. But in Trump’s second administration, the president and his closest advisers have ensured that no one with any integrity will be around to object.
Congress passed a raft of post-Watergate laws and set up new systems intended to restrain the presidency and make government more transparent, less corrupt and more accountable. Trump has systematically set out to destroy them, firing inspectors general, weakening civil service protections, defying the laws he doesn’t like and turning the Department of Justice into his personal machine of political revenge.
After Watergate, we were told that “the cover-up is worse than the crime.” It wasn’t actually true — the cover-up was appalling, but it was preceded by a whole series of atrocious crimes. Trump, however, decided not to even bother with the cover-up. If you don’t try to hide your corruption, lawmakers won’t be as shocked. And if your own party controls Congress, they’ll be too terrified of your voters to hold you accountable.
So when Vance says Watergate would be a one-day story today, he isn’t just observing; he’s boasting. He’s saying: Look what MAGA has done to American politics and media. Look how we have normalized corruption and degraded systems of accountability. We can do whatever we want.
For now, they can. Which is why we’ll need a raft of post-Trump reforms beyond even what Congress passed after Nixon slinked away in disgrace. The most corrupt president in history and his contemptible cronies are trying to justify their own misdeeds by rehabilitating the image of the second-most corrupt president in history. We can’t allow it to succeed.
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