Vance defends Watergate

It's not a smart move

Thanks for reading America Explained: if you want to support our work, please upgrade to a paid subscription.

A few days ago, J.D. Vance raised eyebrows by giving a speech in which he praised Richard Nixon, the former Republican president who resigned due to the Watergate sccandal. “I think that his historical legacy is enjoying a bit of a renaissance — but I think deservedly so,” Vance said of Nixon. “As I joked … 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 then went on to say that Watergate was a “deep state” plot which 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. There is a parallel.”

Oh, and he then compared himself to Nixon: “Young senator, vice president, writes some best-selling books, is hated by the media,” Mr. Vance said. “It kind of sounds like JD Vance. I’ve always liked Richard Nixon.”

Vance gave his speech at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in Orange County, California. I’ve spent three weeks there, and it’s an interesting place.

When a president leaves office, their records get handed over to the National Archives. The National Archives then catalogues them and eventually makes them open for historical research in a presidential library. (Although, this tradition may be coming to an end: the Obama library in Chicago is not going to be a historical research archive, because the Obama folks say all the records will be digitized. And Trump says he isn’t going to hand his records over when he leaves office.)

At the same time, each presidential library is also supported by a private foundation which is responsible for funding construction of the building and organizing various other features and activities to promote the president’s memory. Unlike the National Archives, which are apolitical, the foundations are usually partisan. This leads to a weird situation in which you have a professionally run, neutral historical archive upstairs and a kind of kitschy propaganda museum, run by the foundation, downstairs.

The Nixon presidential library stands out in particular for this contrast. Orange County is - or at least used to be - a national hub of wealthy, upper-class, pro-business Republicanism. Ronald Reagan once said that “Orange County is where the good Republicans go before they die”, but it has also historically been where a lot of them lived before they died as well. (Although interestingly, as educational polarization pushes more and more of the well-to-do away from the GOP and towards the Democrats, that is changing: Orange County voted for Kamala in 2024.)

The Nixon library has reflected the traditionally very conservative DNA of Orange County. The museum barely mentions Watergate or anything bad that Nixon did (Vietnam also gets short shrift), and it has long served as a gathering place for local and national Republican officials who wanted to gripe about stuff and strategize about how to own the libs. Historical researchers there routinely rub shoulders with visiting dignitaries in the elevator. No other presidential library that I’ve been to felt like a living hub in quite the same way.

So for Vance to go there at all is sending a particular type of message: he is trying to ingratiate himself with the traditional GOP establishment, the one that Trump has never quite got along with (Nixon didn’t get along very well with the establishment of his own day, either). And indeed, Vance was there doing fundraising. As finance chair of the Republican National Committee, he travels the country trying to raise campaign cash - and also making connections with the party elites whose support he is going to need when he runs for president.

And this is exactly the sort of audience who would enjoy hearing (a) that Richard Nixon was actually great; and (b) that the guy in front of them who wants to be president thinks Richard Nixon ought to be emulated. So as a short-term appeal to this precise audience, these remarks make sense.

But they also reveal some other things, one worrying, one a potential weakness for Vance. The worrying thing is, of course, that Watergate was actually a very big deal. The president’s men broke into and bugged Democratic Party headquarters, and then the president directed a cover up which involved destroying evidence, bribing the burglars, and trying to get the CIA to put the screws on the FBI to make them stop investigating.

It’s true in one sense that this would probably only be a “12-hour news story” today, but that’s a testament to how mired the Trump regime is in scandal more than anything else. And it’s chilling in the sense that we know today that the FBI and DOJ would not investigate something like Watergate because they are so deeply in Trump’s pocket. In fact, Trump has subverted precisely the norms and rules which were put in place after Watergate to stop things like it happening again. Vance is saying that he’s okay with that.

But I think this points towards a real weakness for Vance. Of course, Nixon foundation bros are going to like these comments. But what about everybody else? Can Vance really be sure that he’s going to inherit Trump’s ability to breeze through all scandal without anything sticking to him? I’m not so sure he is.

Trump manages to weather scandals in part because for many people, support of him is an identity question more than anything else. People see in Trump a fighter, someone who fights for people like them. They see an outsider, someone who is going to smash up the establishment to benefit ordinary people. Of course, the sheen is coming off this proposition somewhat the second time around, but for Trump’s core supporters, this is what remains.

Is anyone going to look at Yale-educated, faux-intellectual J.D. Vance and think the same thing? Is there any upside with the general public for him in comparing himself to a president that most Americans dislike and minimizing corruption and abuses of power that they dislike as well? I don’t think that there is. As with “childless cat ladies”, this seems to me like another example of Vance running his mouth without thinking through the consequences - another thing that Donald Trump gets away with because he’s Donald Trump, but I’m not so sure that J.D. Vance can.