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richard nixon
JD Vance's Drunk History
On June 25, Vice President JD Vance told his audience at the Richard M. Nixon Presidential Library and Museum that Nixon got a bum rap. The uncontested historical record proves otherwise.
Jun 30, 2026
The Watergate scandal revealed President Richard Nixon’s contempt for the Constitution and his systematic abuse of power. At the time, it was one of the darkest chapters in US history, resulting in the first-ever resignation of an American president.
But on June 25, Vice President JD Vance told his audience at the Richard M. Nixon Presidential Library and Museum that Nixon got a bum rap. The uncontested historical record proves otherwise. Vance’s contrary view demonstrates the depths to which he and President Donald Trump have taken the country.
“Facts Are Stubborn Things”
- In May 1972, a group of men connected with the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP) burglarized and wiretapped the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate office complex. One of the wiretaps didn’t work, so on June 17, 1972, they broke in again with a new microphone. A security guard saw door locks that had been taped open and called the DC police, which caught them red-handed. Among the burglars’ possessions was a White House phone number.
- After declaring falsely that no one on the White House staff was involved in the crime, Nixon acquiesced as his aides provided hundreds of thousands of dollars in “hush money” to the burglars. Then Nixon and his top advisers developed a plan to get the CIA to obstruct the FBI’s investigation into the matter.
- As Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein pursued the story, a DC grand jury summoned witnesses who cracked. Nixon aides—including White House counsel John Dean—testified in nationally televised hearings where Sen. Howard Baker (R-Tenn.) asked, “What did the President know and when did he know it?” The answer was “a lot.”
- With the revelation that Nixon had taped his conversations about the cover-up in the Oval Office, the president sought valiantly to block their production.
- When special prosecutor Archibald Cox sued to obtain the tapes, Nixon instructed Attorney General Elliot Richardson to fire him. In what became known as the “Saturday Night Massacre,” Richardson refused and resigned. Nixon then told Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus to fire Cox, but he resigned too. Finally, Nixon turned to the third highest official in the Justice Department, Solicitor General Robert Bork, who carried out the order.
- Firing Cox was the futile act of a desperate man. Bork appointed Leon Jaworski as Cox’s successor, and Jaworski continued to press his case to the US Supreme Court. In a unanimous decision, the court ordered Nixon to release the tapes, and the public could hear Nixon’s own voice incriminate him.
- On July 27, 1974, the House Judiciary Committee recommended articles of impeachment. On August 7, Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-Ariz.), Sen. Hugh Scott (R-Pa.), and Rep. John Rhodes (R-Ariz.) visited the White House to give Nixon the bad news: The full House was going to impeach him, and the Senate would convict him. The next day, Nixon resigned.
Vance’s “Deep State” Fantasies
Vance claimed that Nixon was the victim of a “deep state” conspiracy.
“If you look at the story of how the deep state took down Richard Nixon,” Vance continued, “it’s not all that different from what the same groups of people, the same institutions, tried to do to Donald Trump in the first Trump administration.”
But the supposed “deep state” actors to which Vance referred consisted of Nixon’s top advisers who turned on him, the most conservative Republicans in Congress, a unanimous US Supreme Court, and two intrepid reporters at The Washington Post.
Timothy Naftali, a historian at Columbia University’s School of International Public Affairs and the former director of the Nixon library, told The New York Times: “We have more than enough information from the Nixon era to know that there was no intelligence conspiracy against Richard Nixon. He brought his house of cards down upon himself.”
“You can hear him suborn perjury on the tapes,” Naftali told The Washington Post. “He’s telling an intermediary, what to tell someone who’s about to be interviewed by the FBI, what to say and what not to say. You can hear Nixon being told that money had been found to hire teamsters to go and break the bones of demonstrators. That’s all illegal.”
Lies Reveal Character
Prof. Naftali observed that, curiously, Vance had likened Trump to a president who had directed the CIA to subvert the Constitution.
“It’s not as if [Watergate] is a matter of partisan interpretation,” Naftali said. “The evidence is overwhelming. If [Vance] does know all of this, he’s telegraphing the kind of president he hopes to be.”
Vance also claimed that Watergate would have been a 12-hour news story today. He may be correct, but that does not diminish the seriousness of Nixon’s crimes.
As prof. Naftali observed, “It’s not that Nixon looks better in retrospect, it’s that we look worse.”
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Defense of Nixon's Watergate Crimes Is JD Vance 'Telling on Himself,' Say Critics
"He’s insinuating that his own regime has so normalized corruption and lawlessness that past corruption and lawbreaking schemes now seem minor."
Jun 26, 2026
At an event for the Richard Nixon Foundation on Thursday, Vice President JD Vance suggested that if the 37th president's Watergate scandal had happened today, it would barely make the news, let alone destroy a presidency.
But his critics say that's only because President Donald Trump has totally "normalized" corruption.
During a speech at the Nixon Presidential Library in Yorba Linda, California, Vance celebrated that the "historical legacy" of Tricky Dick, whose name has functioned as a shorthand for presidential lawlessness since his resignation in 1974, "is enjoying a bit of a renaissance, and, I think, deservedly so."
"If Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be like a 12-hour news story," Vance said. "The idea that it would have taken down a presidency is crazy."
He said the way the "deep state took down Richard Nixon" was "not all that different from what the same groups of people, the same institutions tried to do to Donald Trump in the first Trump administration."
Vance also said he personally identified with Nixon: "Young senator, vice president, writes a bestselling book, is hated by the media. It kinda sounds like JD Vance," he said. "I've always liked Richard Nixon."
The vice president was correct that, as Trump adopts a similar philosophy of boundless executive authority, there is a concerted effort among Republicans to rehabilitate the image of Nixon—who infamously declared in a 1977 interview with David Frost that "if the president does it, that means it's not illegal."
Christopher Rufo, an intellectual architect of crusades by the so-called "New Right" against liberal cultural institutions, in 2023 cast Nixon's presidency as "a blueprint for counterrevolution—the last hope for restoring the American republic,” praising his efforts to use lawfare to destroy left-wing groups.
Vivek Ramaswamy, a 2024 Republican presidential candidate who is now running for governor of Ohio, has called for a "revival of Nixonian realism" in foreign policy, citing his "unapologetic American nationalism" and hyperfocus on US interests at the expense of moral concerns.
During a speech at the National Conservatism Conference in 2021, Vance himself cited Nixon's declaration that "the professors are the enemy" to say that the next Republican president would need to “honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country."
Some critics described Vance's downplaying of Watergate's severity on Thursday as a sign of historical ignorance or willful deception.
"Let’s remember what Nixon actually did," said Rep. Mike Levin (D-Calif.). "Operatives tied to his reelection campaign broke into the Democratic National Committee headquarters to plant listening devices. Then Nixon personally orchestrated the cover-up. The 'smoking gun' tape caught him ordering the CIA to shut down the FBI’s investigation."
"Nixon weaponized the IRS and FBI against his political enemies, authorized burglaries of private citizens, and fired the special prosecutor investigating him in what is called the Saturday Night Massacre," continued Levin. "When the Supreme Court ordered him to release the tapes, the vote was unanimous. Even his most loyal defenders walked away once they heard his own words."
"JD Vance works for the most corrupt president in American history," Levin said. "So of course he wants you to believe Watergate was nothing."
Political scientist and author Michael McFaul suggested that Vance was not aware of how bad he sounded.
The fact that Watergate would probably be a mere blip, McFaul said, "is a tragic indictment of [Vance's] administration," and it's "amazing to me that’s not obvious to him."
Others saw it not as a feint from Vance, but as a boast about everything the Trump administration has gotten away with.
"'We do a Watergate twice a day' is a crazy way to confess your own corruption," said Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) in response to Vance's comments.
Amid a litany of other scandals during his second term, Trump has openly used the presidency to make nearly $4 billion since returning to office, accepted lavish gifts from foreign countries while rewarding them politically, and attempted to appropriate taxpayer money to reward his allies. He's pardoned donors and supporters who committed crimes while pushing the Justice Department to target enemies. His administration has brazenly defied the law and the courts to carry out mass deportations of immigrants without due process. And he has carried out hundreds of extrajudicial assassinations and launched multiple illegal wars of aggression without congressional approval.
"Vance is telling on himself," said The Lever editor-in-chief, David Sirota. "He’s insinuating that his own regime has so normalized corruption and lawlessness that past corruption and lawbreaking schemes now seem minor."
John Culver, a retired CIA analyst, said that Vance is "right" that Watergate would no longer register with the public today, "but not for the reasons he thinks."
He blamed modern corporate-controlled media for numbing the public to outrageous political scandals that would have once enveloped a presidency.
Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos "would have fired" Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the journalists who broke the Watergate scandal, "a year earlier," Culver said. "The [New York Times] journos would save it for their book."
He said, "Trump has a Watergate-scale scandal every month, and media billionaires distract, distract, distract.”
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Beware the Trump-Musk Regime Weaponizing Social Security!
There is no Democratic Social Security and Republican Social Security. There is only one Social Security system that we all pay into and we all benefit from.
May 02, 2025
For nearly 90 years, the Social Security Administration has stood above the fray of partisan politics. The agency focused on its mission to deliver hard-earned benefits to every American, regardless of whom they voted for. Official communications channels, such as press releases, never endorsed or criticized a politician.
Indeed, the one time a president tried to politicize Social Security, he was forced to back down. Before benefits were automatically indexed to offset the rise in inflation, Congress would vote for increases that the president signed into law. Those benefits were accompanied by simple straightforward notices, stating that Congress had passed, and the president had signed into law, the enclosed increase.
Just prior to the 1972 election, President Richard Nixon explored the idea of substituting an insert with his signature and photo, hoping to imply that he alone was responsible for the increase (that, ironically, he in fact had opposed). The Social Security Commissioner threatened to publicly resign, and Nixon backed down.
Not only is the Trump-Musk regime lying to you, they are using your money to do it.
President Donald Trump and Elon Musk are throwing that long-standing tradition of neutrality in the trash. The Social Security Administration (SSA) announced that it would be posting its official announcements on Elon Musk’s for-profit social media platform, alongside the platform’s paid advertisements. Consistent with that declaration, SSA’s official account posted a thread to Musk’s platform, X, that began “Former President Joe Biden is lying to Americans.”
This thread was filled with misleading information and used offensive, politically charged language, including “illegal aliens.” Contrary to the thread’s implications, undocumented immigrants do not and cannot receive Social Security. In fact, SSA has determined that undocumented workers have been subsidizing the rest of us to the tune of $25 billion a year, since many of them contribute (under fake Social Security numbers) but never receive a penny of their earned benefits.
This is a wildly inappropriate use of SSA’s resources. Like the rest of SSA, the agency’s official communications are paid for by the American people’s Social Security contributions. Normally, SSA is very efficient, spending less than a penny of every dollar contributed on administrative expenses. But now, some of that money is being wasted and misused on politics. Not only is the Trump-Musk regime lying to you, they are using your money to do it.
Unfortunately, this is just one of many ways the Trump-Musk regime is weaponizing Social Security. After the governor of Maine publicly challenged Trump, Social Security canceled two contracts with her state.
The contracts, which the federal government has with every state, are extremely efficient and important. One of them allows parents to register their newborns for Social Security cards at the hospital, instead of dragging their babies to overcrowded field offices. The other quickly transmits when anyone in the state has died, so benefits can be immediately terminated.
To punish the governor of Maine, the Trump administration decided to punish the parents of newborns. After massive public outrage, the Trump administration was forced to reinstate the contracts.
Trump and Musk could declare people dead because they are political enemies, or members of a disfavored group. They could extort people by threatening to declare them dead.
Leaked emails leave no doubt that the Trump-handpicked acting head of SSA, Leland Dudek, terminated the contracts as political revenge. An SSA employee told Dudek that terminating the contracts “would result in improper payments and potential for identity theft.” Dudek replied, “Please cancel the contracts. While our improper payments will go up, and fraudsters may compromise identities, no money will go from the public trust to a petulant child,” by whom he meant Maine Gov. Janet Mills.
Most chillingly of all, the Trump-Musk regime is illegally falsifying government data by adding people to Social Security’s death master file—despite knowing that they are still alive. Their initial targets are thousands of legal migrants, who have Social Security numbers so that they can work in the U.S.
When Social Security wrongly declares a living person dead, it ruins their life. Financial institutions, health insurance companies, and many other entities rely on Social Security’s data, and they react quickly when someone is declared dead. Imagine, in one keystroke from “Big Balls” or another Musk henchman, losing your income, your health insurance, access to your bank account, your credit cards, your home, and more. This is financial murder.
Legal migrants are the first victims, but if the Trump-Musk regime gets away with this, they will not be the last. Trump and Musk could declare people dead because they are political enemies, or members of a disfavored group. They could extort people by threatening to declare them dead.
All of this is particularly outrageous because Social Security is a nonpartisan program. Democrats, Republicans, and independents alike all value their Social Security benefits and want to see them expanded, not cut. There is no Democratic Social Security and Republican Social Security.
The American people’s message for Trump and Musk is simple: There is only one Social Security system that we all pay into and we all benefit from. Hands off.
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