All the President’s Apologists

In recent years, the foundation has become active online, framing Tricky Dick not as a craven megalomaniac but a champion of the people, and — in tandem with popular conservative pundits and leaders — has sought to rewrite the story of Watergate as a kind of putsch via bureaucratic cabal. This account, once a marginal perspective expressed only by Nixon’s most ardent apologists, has in the last few years gone mainstream as his foundation embarked on a blitzkrieg of TikToks, social media posts and an upcoming film to build a new generation of neo-Nixonians.

But why Nixon now, more than ever? With the return of Donald Trump to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, the historical implications couldn’t be clearer. Rehabilitating the president most synonymous with executive overreach and corruption paves the way for a return of Nixonian — and now Trumpist — power politics. Casting doubt on Nixon’s tapestry of crimes paints his modern-day successor, and the MAGA movement’s contemporary version of right-wing populism, as being unfairly disparaged, just like Nixon and his Silent Majority.

From Vice President-elect JD Vance to right-wing education activist Christopher Rufo — who helped manufacture the 2021-2022 critical race theory hysteria — fashionable right-wingers have become enthusiastic participants in Nixon revisionism. 

When he was running for Senate in 2021, Vance invoked Nixon’s reactionary sagacity while speaking at that year’s National Conservatism conference, declaring that the ​“wisdom” today’s conservatives need could be found in Nixon’s declaration that ​“The professors are the enemy.”

In a 2023 video for the Manhattan Institute, the right-wing think tank where he works as a senior fellow, Rufo called on the Right to emulate the right-wing ​“counterrevolution” that Nixon had launched against enemies he cast as radical Marxists, elite apparatchiks and insubordinate college students. They should do so, Rufo explained, both by ​“mobiliz[ing] federal law enforcement against the left-wing radical organizations that engaged in political violence during the summer of George Floyd” (“What Nixon did to the Black Panther Party, the next president must do to the violent factions of our time”) and by embracing Nixon’s broader ​“call for a new American revolution,” by ​“lay[ing] siege to the institutions and reorient[ing] them according to their own values — whatever the odds.”

The foundation was also happy to host then-GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy for a speech at their California headquarters in 2023, where Ramaswamy — now helping lead a new Trump initiative to lay off masses of federal workers — claimed Nixon was ​“misunderstood.”

“I think he is, by far and away, the most underappreciated president of our modern history in this country, probably in all of American history,” Ramaswamy said. ​“He was somebody who had a deep skepticism for the bureaucracy that sucks the lifeblood out of a constitutional republic.”

All three of these champions of illiberalism demonstrate how the contemporary Right wants to emulate Nixon’s aggressive, conniving style of politics — one that collapses the complicated economic and social interests of modern capitalism into a philosophical war between ​“the People” and the ​“Elites.”

Then there’s the increasing popularity of Watergate revisionism, as the claim that Nixon’s campaign of political spying and cover-ups was actually a coup concocted by his enemies has become a common refrain on today’s Right. Take an April interview between the Right’s most articulate huckster, former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, and the internet’s most credulous man, podcaster Joe Rogan. At one point during their three-hour conversation last spring, Carlson charged that the scandal was actually a coordinated operation by the FBI, CIA and Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward.

“Okay, so that’s a deep-state coup,” Carlson declared to the largest listenership in podcasting. ​“How [else] would you describe that? If that happened in Guatemala, what would you say?”

Nixon’s renewed popularity is at least in part rooted in his self-pitying populism — a clear forerunner to Trumpism today. Even before Watergate, Nixon’s own mythology depicted him as aggrieved innocent besieged by an effete status quo. As a young man attending California’s Whittier College, Nixon encountered a social hierarchy dominated by a clique of well-to-do snobs, student-athletes and coddled debutantes known collectively as the Franklins. The future president sought to confront this order by forming his own social circle, the Orthogonians, as a way to represent the common, unfashionable folks on campus, who, as Nixon saw it, always took it on the nose from the Franklins. 

To Nixon, the world could be distilled into these two camps, engaged in an endless struggle for supremacy. This philosophy followed him into Congress, the vice presidency and, eventually, to the highest office in the land. In his mind, the Franklins — like his archnemesis John F. Kennedy — were always allowed to fight dirty, but the Orthogonians were expected to be pristine Boy Scouts. 

And it was this deeply resentful worldview that allowed Nixon to see his crimes as completely justifiable. 

So even when the weight of his illegal surveillance of enemies, the briberies, the unsanctioned bombings, the subversion of democratic oversight and the subsequent cover-ups caved in on each other, it was only fitting that the dishonored president would act like he was a good Orthogonian for resigning — despite Nixon having always been a notoriously Machiavellian politico willing to do anything for power.

When the U.S. public began to sour on the intelligence community following the revelations of the Church Committee — a 1975 Senate investigation into FBI and CIA misconduct — Nixon diehards advanced a more crank account of Watergate, refashioning the former president as an honorable man caught in the crosshairs of a relentless partisan ministry. Never mind that Nixon actively tried to use the CIA to undermine the FBI’s investigation into his wrongdoings.

Today, this Nixon-as-victim narrative fits neatly within the MAGA movement’s worldview of Donald Trump squaring off against an entrenched, center-left ​“deep state.” In August, a former Nixon lawyer who served on his Domestic Council, Geoff Shepard, made such a case during an appearance on Tucker Carlon’s podcast. Amid discussing his own take on Watergate — that the scandal was a deep state ploy to elect Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy as president — Shepard invoked numerous Watergate conspiracy theories as a means to defend Trump.

“If Donald Trump hoped to understand what he would face upon moving into the White House in 2017, he would have done well to study what happened to Richard Nixon nearly fifty years prior,” Shepard writes in his 2021 book, The Nixon Conspiracy: Watergate and the Plot to Remove the President. ​“By the time Nixon took power in 1969, the ​‘Deep State’ had held the reins of power for forty years and wasn’t about to give it up.”

Shepard’s argument speaks not just to today’s QAnon-inflected paranoia, but also to how such thinking has become institutionalized within the mainstream conservative movement. And the Nixon Foundation, whom Shepard is intimately involved with as a kind of in-house historian, has been more than happy to play along.

Indeed, the Nixon Foundation has long attempted to control the historical record as a way to resurrect its namesake’s reputation, as Nixon and his movement were kept at the periphery of conservative politics. For years, the foundation was incredibly protective, only granting access to key documents and important historical artifacts — for example, the president’s intimate diaries — to pro-Nixon scholars, keeping them out of the hands of left-leaning academics and the nonpartisan National Archives. 

While Michael Koncewicz, a Nixon historian who worked at the official presidential library and museum, says that the National Archives typically let presidential foundations set the public narrative about their namesake, that practice is ​“especially glaring and troublesome when it comes to the only president to ever resign in America.”

And when Nixon’s official library and museum finally opened 34 years ago in Yorba Linda, California, it offered a particularly biased curation of his story, with an exhibit, Koncewicz explains, arguing ​“that Richard Nixon was taken down by the liberal establishment — both in the media and inside the government — to reverse the results of the 1972 election.” 

These instances of revisionism appear to be in service of a much more cynical, revanchist narrative, one that positions Nixon’s ultimate project — the unwinding of the administrative state and the government employees who uphold it — as a task to be completed by Trump.

Much like Project 2025, the now-infamous plans crafted by the Heritage Foundation to guide a second Trump presidency, Nixon’s allies were deeply preoccupied with ridding the federal government of ideological opponents, explains historian Rick Perlstein, author of two in-depth books about Nixon: Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America and The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan. They even had their own Nixon-era blueprint to carry this out: the ​“Malek Manual,” a document authored by close Nixon ally Fred Malek — most famous for carrying out Nixon’s orders to remove all Jewish workers employed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics — and which sought to expel all federal workers deemed disloyal to Nixon. 

In a close echo of contemporary right-wing complaints about ​“deep state” obstructionism, the manual charges that, ​“The record is quite replete with instances of the failures of program, policy and management goals because of sabotage by employees of the executive branch who engage in the frustration of those efforts because of their political persuasion and their loyalty to the majority party of Congress rather than the executive that supervises them.” 

“If you listen to the tapes,” explains Perlstein, referring to the trove of audio that Nixon recorded from within the Oval Office, ​“you know Nixon is obsessed” with the idea of purging the government of perceived traitors. From Nixon’s perspective, Perlstein continues, ​“The federal government is just this nest of liberals who are working against the president,” when instead all government employees ​“should serve at the pleasure of the president.” And the man he tapped to help him was as far from being a fringe figure in his time as Malek’s modern counterparts at the Heritage Foundation — likewise plotting a clean sweep of the government — are today.

It’s parallels like these that help us build a bridge from Nixon to Trump, and which help explain why, since Trump captured the Republican Party, the Nixon Foundation has sought to ingratiate itself with the Trumpist Right — even going so far as to display letters between a youthful Trump and an aging Nixon during the 1980s. It seems the foundation views the two presidents as part of the same shared mission to finally overthrow the ​“Franklins” and their deep state counterparts —even if the real goal is just to replace them with a more ideologically aligned elite.

The Nixon Foundation appears to be cementing this with its forthcoming documentary—simply titled Nixon—that draws on the similarities between the Nixon years and our current domestic polarization. To be released in 2025, the trailer depicts Nixon as a figure of unity who offered stability during a turbulent, divided era. Through this lens, Nixon comes across as a noble, selfless statesman trying to wrestle the elites into submission. His unabated quest for power is transformed into an earnest mission to even the score for America’s beleaguered Orthogonians, his corruption exaggerated by enemies who feed on conflict.

In this hall of funhouse mirrors, history becomes a weapon of mass deception, and not for the first time. 

Throughout Trump’s run as the Most Dangerous Man in America, the vile precedents set by Nixon — as well as Reagan and Bush — were reworked into a far more favorable light: Trump made all of them look innocent by comparison. However, focusing more on the contrasts than the continuity may have been crucial in bringing us to this demented juncture. 

Most urgently, the rehabilitation of Nixon may become a blueprint for Trump’s defenders to rewrite his own legacy. Indeed, the soon-to-be 47^th president may owe his reelection in part to the pessimism that Nixon, Watergate and his new apologists have engendered. If we fail to consider this context — of how figures like Nixon brought us to this precipice — then maybe it won’t ever be illegal if the president commits a crime. Maybe down the line, Trump, just like Nixon, could prove another precedent for something even more sinister.