In recent years, there’s been a puzzling effort by Republican party activists to praise Richard Nixon, America’s 37th president who resigned in disgrace in August 1974 as he faced impeachment for obstruction of justice, abuse of power, and refusal to cooperate with congressional subpoenas stemming from the Watergate scandal.
In August 2023, then Republican presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy, now a candidate for Ohio governor, praised Nixon as the most underappreciated president in modern U.S. history. During a June 25 appearance this year at the Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in California, Trump’s Vice President J.D. Vance likened Nixon’s ouster to efforts to hold President Donald Trump accountable in his first term, blaming the “deep state” for his downfall. Vance claimed Watergate wouldn’t be much of a story today.
In a recent commentary, Salon political columnist Heather Digby Parton tries to make sense of MAGA-Trump aligned politicians and influencers seemingly coordinated attempt to rehabilitate Richard “Tricky Dick” Nixon.” To this day, Nixon has the worst approval ratings among 10 U.S. presidents, even among Republicans. Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Parton about her column titled, “The Dark Reasons Behind All the Richard Nixon Worship,” which she believes is part of a strategy to justify Donald Trump’s abuse of power and crimes against the Constitution in order to protect the Republican party’s political future.
HEATHER DIGBY PARTON: So it makes sense because we can trace the Trump administration and all of its corruption and abuses all the way back to Richard Nixon and how the Republican party has been building toward this moment when the president would function this way with the Supreme Court that they have now basically rubber-stamping that idea. So I think it’s not surprising that Nixon would come up now. And then of course there’s two other things. One is we heard JD Vance last summer, early in the summer, I think it was last June, giving a talk at the Nixon library saying that he really relates to Nixon. He thinks he’s a lot like him. Vice president wrote a bestselling book hated by the media. And as I say in my piece, he’s not wrong. He is a lot like Richard Nixon. And it’s a very unusual moment of self-awareness that he actually admitted that in public.
But there’s a reason for him to embrace Richard Nixon in following this whole trajectory of the Republican party. In order for anybody who’s been complicit in everything that Donald Trump has done and who wants a future in politics after Donald Trump is gone, they’re going to have to find a way to justify all this. And I think the only way they can do it is to say that Richard Nixon was taken down by the deep state. And that brings us to apparently this investigation by the Department of Justice, Trump’s Department of Justice, into the Watergate investigation. I mean, I know it’s hard to believe and I laughed out loud when I saw it, but yes, they’re going to investigate the investigators, the special prosecutor’s office of Watergate, because some historical revisionist guy who has been beating this drum for decades came up and gave some kind of a presentation apparently to the Department of Justice saying that they needed to do this, that Richard Nixon was framed, he was set up and this was all a matter of the deep state trying to get him out of office.
And by doing this, what they’re doing is trying to draw that line and say that this goes all the way back to Richard Nixon. The deep state’s been out to get Republicans. They were out to get him. They were out to get Trump, Russia, Russia, Russia. And JD Vance was just fighting a good fight. And basically he’s the guy who, or whoever it could be, Marco Rubio too, could take advantage of this. Any complicit Republican who seeks higher office after Trump is gone is going to have to find a way to do it. And I can’t for the life of me think of anything else. How else could they justify their behavior once Trump is gone? Because they’re all just basically, they’ve given any semblance of integrity—they’ve given that up and so they’re going to have to find an excuse. So that was my theory that you mentioned, this idea that what they’re doing is basically trying to extend out this deep state myth that they’ve developed all the way back to Nixon and say that this is what they’re suffering from.
And it’s a systemic problem that doesn’t just apply to Trump. It goes all the way back and poor JD Vance, and I’m sure he’ll say he’s a victim of it as well. So that’s essentially my theory on all of that because otherwise, why would anybody bring up Richard Nixon at this point in the middle of all this stuff with Trump? Because you’d think they’d want to keep it on the down low rather than bring it up and have everybody thinking about the last completely corrupt president who was forced to resign.
SCOTT HARRIS: How important is it given this attempt to rehabilitate Nixon and by extension to rehabilitate Donald Trump when he’s gone, in advance? How important is it for the Democrats to really push hard for accountability, prosecutions, sanctions against all those who are complicit in violating the Constitution and direct attacks on democracy?
HEATHER DIGBY PARTON: It’s vitally important. I mean, one of the big problems that happened, I think we can trace this back to Nixon without any question, which is that when Gerald Ford pardoned him, that was the big mistake. And it led to the idea of this impunity for crimes committed by the president. Now, many of his people did go to jail. I mean, they had, I don’t know, G. Gordon Liddy, what was it? Close to four years I think he did. I think (White House Chief of Staff Bob) Haldeman and (Assistant for Domestic Affairs John) Ehrlichman did 18 months. I mean, they did real jail terms. The former Attorney General John Mitchell went to jail. So there was accountability at that point, but the fact that the president himself, just for the good of the country or whatever, that was a huge mistake and they really cannot afford to make that mistake again because of the blatantness of the corruption and the abuse of power that we’re seeing.
It absolutely has to be done. I mean, I hope everybody agrees that anyone who is not deep into the Trump cult at this point, the MAGA cult recognizes that this is going to take a lot of work and a lot of commitment to put this right. And accountability is at the absolutely top of the list. It can’t happen otherwise.
Listen to Scott Harris’ in-depth interview with Heather Digby Parton (15:29) and see more articles and opinion pieces in the related links section of this page. To subscribe to our podcasts, email newsletters, our Between The Lines Radio Newsmagazine Substack or social media, subscribe here.
