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Former President Richard Nixon puts his hand to his head during an interview with journalist David Frost in April 1977. | John Bryson/Getty Images President Donald Trump is approaching the halfway point of his second term, raising the question of what — and who — comes next. And, more existentially: Can the MAGA movement survive without him?
To answer that question, some younger conservatives on the “New Right” are looking to a past US president for inspiration: Richard Milhous Nixon.
In June, Vice President JD Vance spoke at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in California, downplaying the scandal that ended Nixon’s presidency. If Watergate happened today, Vance said, it would be “like a 12-hour news story. Like, the idea that it would have taken down a presidency is crazy.”
Watergate, of course, is the most famous scandal in presidential history and the reason so many of our contemporary imbroglios get tagged with the -gate suffix. It began with a 1972 break-in at the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters in Washington’s Watergate complex by operatives linked to Nixon’s reelection campaign. Investigations — and a huge volume of Oval Office tapes recorded by Nixon — exposed Nixon’s involvement in the cover-up, and he resigned in 1974 facing the prospect of impeachment and removal from office.
Nevertheless, some conservatives are now embracing a rehabilitation of Nixon’s image dubbed “Nixonmaxxing.” They portray him as a president brought down by the “deep state” — an entrenched network of unelected government officials that they believe also tried to undermine Trump during his first term (and is still trying today).
Today, Explained co-host Noel King spoke with political historian Michael Koncewicz, the associate director of New York University’s Institute for Public Knowledge, about what actually brought Nixon down, why Watergate was, in fact, a big deal, and why some conservatives are undeterred and looking to the 37th president for inspiration today.
Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
Because we live in a fallen world, we are here today to talk about something they’re calling Nixonmaxxing. Why are young conservatives interested in former President Richard Milhous Nixon?
Nixon’s ultimately known for Watergate, and Watergate for decades was the ultimate scandal in American politics. And younger conservatives are starting to revisit this history and they’ve started to compare the Watergate scandal to numerous attempts to bring down the Trump presidency.
Nixon is a martyr for the cause. Nixon is the guy who was successfully brought down by the liberal establishment. And so if younger conservatives can rescue Nixon from liberal historians and liberal journalists, they think that they can protect the current president for decades to come.
In the last decade or so, more and more media figures — and this has seeped down into conservative activists — have questioned a story that most Americans accept, which is that Watergate was a moment where the system worked. It’s a moment where Congress, the media, and the American public helped bring down a corrupt president.
Conservative activists want you to believe that that’s not true. And the main reason is that if they can make you believe that that’s a lie, then they can make you question any future scandal that could affect any one of their guys.
What was the Watergate scandal? What did Richard Nixon actually do?
Watergate can best be understood as a story that begins, at least, in the summer of 1971. After the release of the Pentagon Papers, which was a secret history of the Vietnam War compiled by figures in the Johnson administration, Richard Nixon is enraged.
In the summer of 1971, the reason that this matters and why it’s linked to Watergate is that in the wake of the Pentagon Papers coming out, Nixon authorizes the creation of the “Plumbers” unit: a group of shady guys with CIA and FBI on their resume, people who have experience doing black bag jobs.
“It remains to be seen how influential Nixonmaxxing is as a political phenomenon. Richard Nixon is still seen as one of the worst, most corrupt presidents in American history.”
The first operation that they pull off is breaking into Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office — he’s the man who leaked the Pentagon Papers. It’s referred to by Nixon historians as Watergate West. But when they pull this off, they are not caught and it’s dismissed as just a weird moment. No one knows that at the time these are guys being paid by the White House to break into buildings and spy on political opponents.
There’s a lot of other activities that happened between summer of ’71 and June of ’72, but the Watergate burglars, the Plumbers, are caught at the Watergate Hotel. And what is at the Watergate Hotel? It is the offices of the Democratic National Committee.
They’re caught in June of ’72, and even then it’s dismissed as a so-called third-rate burglary because this just seems like some overeager campaign staff members who have nothing to do with the Nixon White House.
But on the tapes, we know that Richard Nixon, even if he didn’t have any link to the Watergate break-in, knows that he created this team. He knows that his advisers are aware of different parts of their activities over the previous year. That was not uncovered until 1973, which is when most of the American people and most people in Congress started to take this scandal seriously. Watergate ends Nixon’s presidency when it becomes clear to the American people that he has something to hide.
The famous phrase attached to Watergate is that it was not the crime, it’s the coverup. That’s true to an extent, in terms of what was on the tapes that made it very clear that Nixon was obstructing justice. But he was covering up pretty serious crimes. He was covering up a lot of improper uses of presidential power.
And so in the summer and fall of 1973, that is when Richard Nixon’s approval rating started to decline — a 25 percent approval rating. And when people ask why Richard Nixon stepped down, that’s the No. 1 reason. When his approval rating is that low, members of Congress feel the pressure to take on an unprecedented action, which is impeachment. The House was going to impeach Richard Nixon and the Senate was going to convict Richard Nixon.
And so in subsequent years and decades, there’s this understanding that Watergate was a bad thing. Watergate was a serious constitutional crisis and that it was good that Richard Nixon stepped down, that our democracy was strengthened as a result of Watergate. And today’s conservatives are increasingly questioning that narrative.
Richard Nixon wouldn’t be in the position he is in currently if he hadn’t done some things that a certain type of conservative today thinks is noble or laudable or important.
What was he doing at the time that makes a guy like Chris Rufo or the vice president say, “Hey, you know what? We need to reconsider Nixon”?
Figures like Christopher Rufo are drawn to Richard Nixon because the historical record shows that behind the scenes, he was a fierce culture warrior.
Other presidents in the post-World War II era were certainly guilty of improper uses of presidential power. Nixon’s key difference was he wanted to bring that into the White House and micromanage the hell out of it. And Christopher Rufo loves that about Richard Nixon. He believes that presidents should use their powers to go after groups that he thinks are hurting the country.
We now know that Nixon was a far more aggressive culture warrior behind the scenes.
He was someone who wanted to create a new establishment, one that would weaken liberals in the media. Richard Nixon said on the Nixon tapes in a meeting with his closest advisers, [“The professors are the enemy. Professors are the enemy. Write that on the blackboard 100 times and never forget it.”]
Both Christopher Rufo and our current vice president, JD Vance, love the quote. JD Vance, when he was running as a Senate candidate in late 2021, gave a speech at the National Conservatism Conference and he used that quote.
This was just five years ago, and it would’ve been unthinkable for any conservative politician to favorably quote Richard Nixon, especially if they had aspirations to be president of the United States someday. But our current vice president, JD Vance, someone who will likely run for president in 2028, has publicly embraced Richard Nixon’s legacy.
President Trump is apparently in decline and his hold on the Republican Party over the next couple years will weaken, right? With so many of these stories, you wonder whether it’s like a handful of coconuts being nutty or whether this kind of effort means something for the future of the Republican Party.
Do you think that this is notable, important, or significant?
It remains to be seen how influential Nixonmaxxing is as a political phenomenon. Richard Nixon is still seen as one of the worst, most corrupt presidents in American history.
I used to lead school tours at the Richard Nixon Library 10, 15 years ago, and I would regularly talk to high school students, sometimes even middle school students, and they came in with a little bit of knowledge about Richard Nixon, and that knowledge was usually centered around the fact that Nixon got in trouble and Nixon was bad.
I am slightly encouraged by that fact because it shows you that Watergate is still viewed as an exceptional period of time.
However, as I told people during Trump’s first administration, Watergate should be seen as a product of a very different political culture. It wasn’t just that the system worked — it did — but it worked because our democratic culture was far stronger than it is today. Our civic institutions were far stronger than they are today. You had a broader culture of dissent and a broader culture of questioning our president that contributed to Nixon’s downfall.
Unfortunately, our political culture today is far more divided and far less willing to rally around a single narrative that would lead to another Watergate resignation happening in the same way [as] what we saw in the summer of 1974.
