When The Wall Street Journal first reported that Donald Trump’s Justice Department is re-evaluating the work of prosecutors in the Watergate investigation, the news was met with incredulity and outrage by those who actually know the history of Watergate — and those who lived it. As my colleague Steve Benen put it:

[I]t’s bonkers to think [Richard] Nixon was brought down by nefarious government insiders who plotted against him. We have, after all, heard the tapes. Nixon chose to engage in systemic abuses. His crimes were his own, not the fault of “the deep state.”

This is not the Trump administration’s first effort at Nixon revisionism. Indeed, there is a whole cottage industry on the right these days devoted to rehabilitating the former Republican president. But there is more happening here than just redeeming the reputation of a fellow Republican president.

Turning the story of Watergate on its head certainly offers some direct benefits to the current president. For one thing, if the Justice Department previously was bent on undermining a GOP president, that would lend credence to Trump’s claims of victimhood. For another, if Nixon didn’t actually do anything wrong, then the good-government reforms enacted in the wake of Watergate would be unnecessary — justifying the Trump administration’s ongoing gutting of those reforms.

But the most pernicious effect of the White House’s Watergate revisionism could be the way it threatens to upend our collective sense of America itself. Trump’s second term has been marked by an obsession with recasting American history. He is at war with the Smithsonian; he has directed the country’s national parks to remove historical signage he deems disparaging; he is pressuring schools and universities to alter their curricula. Historical revisionism is central to authoritarian politics. Just look at Vladimir Putin: As his Russian government has become steadily more tyrannical amid his war on Ukraine, he and his allies have glorified the murderous and repressive regimes of the Soviet era — while criminalizing those who record the true history.

When it comes to Watergate, of course, there have always been Nixon apologists. But it is as close to a settled fact of American history as it gets that Nixon was guilty of the transgressions that led to his resignation. Why take aim at this foundational plank of our collective historical understanding?

I am reminded of something the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and historian Anne Applebaum said on “The Rachel Maddow Show” in the fall of 2024, when Rachel asked her about the disturbing prevalence of Holocaust deniers and World War II revisionists in the orbit of the Trump-Vance campaign:

We’re a country that has a very complicated history. People take different sides on different issues. One of the few things we’ve agreed on is that we were on the right side in the Second World War. It’s one of the things that defines America in the second half of the 20th century and the first half of the current century. If you undermine that, you take away … one of the few things that we really all have in common, and I think that’s deliberate.

If you … destroy [a country’s] sense of what it is, if you make people doubt the system, the history, everything they’ve always believed in — you know, was Churchill even our friend? Then you prepare the country for something very radically different, and I think there are people around Trump who want that.

Vice President JD Vance’s good friend Tucker Carlson continues to push the idea that we were on the wrong side of World War II, as recently as last week. An America in which we are no longer sure if that war was right, or if slavery was bad, or whether Nixon did anything wrong, certainly would be something “radically different.” It would be the kind of country Trump wants to lead — and the kind of country he wants us to believe we’ve always been.

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