JD Vance stood inside the Richard Nixon Presidential Library on Thursday and told a crowd that Watergate, the scandal that ended a presidency and defined American political accountability for half a century, would barely register as news today. He said this out loud. With his mouth. Into a microphone.
The Quote That Should Follow Him Forever
"If Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be a 12-hour news story," Vance said, according to The Guardian's reporting on the event. "The idea that it would have taken down a presidency is crazy."
Let that breathe for a second. The sitting Vice President of the United States went to the literal shrine built to honor the only American president who ever resigned in disgrace, and used it as a venue to argue that said president's crimes were no big deal. This is not a fever dream. This happened.
Vance was there to promote his new book, Communion, which tracks his conversion from atheism to Catholicism. Somewhere between the spiritual awakening chapters, he apparently also found time to rehabilitate one of the most thoroughly documented criminal conspiracies in American political history.
The 'Deep State Did Nixon' Theory, Presented Seriously
Here is where it gets truly special. Vance did not just argue that Watergate was overblown. He argued it was a targeted takedown by shadowy institutional forces. "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," The Guardian quotes him saying.
The deep state, in this framing, apparently includes: the FBI agents who investigated a literal break-in, the prosecutors who followed the evidence, the Republican senators who told Nixon his support had collapsed, the Supreme Court which unanimously ruled against him on the tapes, and Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, two reporters at a newspaper. Quite the conspiracy.
What actually took down Nixon, for the record, was Nixon. His own campaign operatives broke into Democratic National Committee headquarters. He paid hush money to cover it up. He ordered the CIA to obstruct the FBI investigation. There are recordings of him doing this. The recordings still exist. You can listen to them.
Trump Gets the Same Treatment, Naturally
Vance drew his explicit parallel between Nixon and Trump, the two presidents he apparently views as martyrs to institutional overreach. Trump, as The Guardian notes, was impeached twice during his first term: once for pressuring Ukraine's president to investigate Joe Biden by threatening to withhold military aid, and once for his role in inflaming the January 6 mob that stormed the Capitol.
Both impeachments, in Vance's framing, are presumably also the work of the same shadowy deep state apparatus that got Nixon. The bipartisan votes. The documented phone calls. The hours of footage from the Capitol that day. All of it: a setup.
This is a coherent worldview only if you start from the premise that powerful men simply cannot be guilty of the things they are documented as having done. It is a useful worldview if you are a powerful man.
The Renaissance Man Who Forgot One Thing
Vance also argued, per The Guardian, that Nixon's legacy is "enjoying a bit of a renaissance," crediting him with ending the Vietnam War and opening diplomatic relations with China. Fair enough, those are real achievements. Nixon was a genuinely complicated figure with real policy accomplishments and a documented criminal streak, which is not a contradiction.
But the most revealing moment came when Vance compared himself directly to Nixon. "Young senator. Vice-president. Writes some bestselling books. Is hated by the media," he said. "It kind of sounds like JD Vance."
The Guardian's reporter noticed what Vance, a widely assumed 2028 presidential hopeful, conspicuously left off that list. Nixon's defining role. The thing Nixon is most remembered for, besides the tapes and the resignation. The presidency. Vance rattled off every step of Nixon's career arc except the destination. Presumably an oversight.
What This Is Actually About
None of this is accidental. Trump and his allies have been systematically working to rewrite the public understanding of Watergate for years. The Guardian notes that Trump has previously claimed Nixon "may" have been guilty, which is a strange hedge given the audio recordings of Nixon committing crimes, but ideological projects require flexible relationships with documented facts.
The goal is straightforward: if Watergate can be recast as a deep state operation rather than a criminal conspiracy, then every subsequent use of government accountability mechanisms against Republican presidents can be dismissed using the same template. Impeachment? Deep state. Special counsel? Deep state. Courts ruling against you? Deep state.
It is an elegant system, once you accept that evidence is just propaganda produced by your enemies. And Vance, former Yale Law graduate and now heir apparent to Trumpism, is making the case with a book tour and a visit to a presidential library, which lends it a sheen of intellectual respectability it absolutely does not deserve.
The Dingo Take
Look, JD Vance is a smart guy. That is what makes this so dispiriting. He went to Yale Law. He has read books, apparently enough of them to write several. He knows what Watergate was. He knows there are tapes. He is not confused about the facts. He has simply decided that the facts are less important than the political project, and the project right now is making accountability itself seem like the crime.
The Nixon library as a venue was a nice touch, credit where it's due. There is something almost poetic about standing in a monument to a disgraced president and arguing that the disgrace was the real scandal. It has the same energy as holding a press conference outside a courthouse to argue that courts are illegitimate. Which, come to think of it, is also something that has happened recently.
Vance is laying groundwork. Whether it's for 2028 or for something more immediate, the argument he's constructing is that any institutional resistance to MAGA power is by definition corrupt, and any Republican president caught doing something illegal is by definition a victim. Nixon got there first. Trump refined it. Vance is now building the library.
