JD Vance’s Nixon defense is part of the GOP’s war on accountability

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. 

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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.”

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.