Vice President JD Vance, who once mused that Donald J. Trump might be a “cynical [expletive deleted]” like Richard M. Nixon, is now embracing a rosier comparison of the two presidents that is both ahistoric and, perhaps inadvertently, bracingly truthful.
Speaking on Thursday at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library in Yorba Linda, Calif., Mr. Vance said that “if Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be like, a 12-hour news story. The idea that it would have taken down a presidency is crazy.”
The “deep state” that took down Nixon, he said, tried to do the same to Mr. Trump. “There’s a parallel,” he said.
Never mind that the Watergate-era deep state Mr. Vance derided included Nixon appointees who refused to go along with the White House-orchestrated abuse of power and criminal coverup. And that Nixon resigned after Republicans in Congress joined Democrats in conducting an intensive investigation and then in approving articles of impeachment.
But if Mr. Vance may be somewhat off on the history of the 1970s, he speaks from experience about the current life cycle of scandals, which age like fruit flies.
Questions of impropriety — or worse — buzz around, then flutter off. Presidential stock trades are replaced by pardons to contributors, which are replaced by new presidential branding schemes, which are replaced by contracts to the connected, which are replaced by elective surgery to national landmarks.
“Vance is right that the political landscape today is different,” said Andrew Rudalevige, a presidential scholar at Bowdoin College. “He might be right that it would be a brief story. That’s not a reason to praise Nixon. It’s a reason to criticize the current political and media establishment.”
In fact, Watergate might have been a brief story in the 1970s but for the persistence of journalists, primarily at The Washington Post, and of federal criminal investigators who insisted on investigating crimes even though they led to the White House, which itself was working to corrupt the Justice Department.
During the long gestation of the Watergate scandal, there were intense partisan divides and denials, but when the congressional hearings rolled out in 1973, there was a set of facts that widely took hold, independent of partisan affiliation, news consumption habits or social media feeds.
“If you were a Republican in 1973, you were watching the same thing as Democrats and independents,” Mr. Rudalevige said.
Now, the streams of information and media are so divided that they allow everyone to rest comfortably on their islands of preferred truths. Legacy media, like broadcast networks and major metropolitan newspapers, no longer occupy the dominant place in the culture that they did in the age of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. And political figures like Mr. Trump have grown skilled at curating their own reality in a way that would have seemed inconceivable half a century ago.
“We have managed to come around to almost approving of an armed attack on the Capitol,” Mr. Rudalevige said.
“He’s literally rewriting history,” he said of Mr. Trump. “Nixon would have loved to have been able to pull that off.”
As Mr. Vance said, Nixon’s “legacy is enjoying a bit of a renaissance.” This is true mostly among far-right activists and commentators who see him as a warrior against the leftist culture of the 1960s who was undone by the establishment, much like Mr. Trump fighting “wokeness” today.
Timothy Naftali, a presidential historian at Columbia and the first federal director of the Nixon Presidential Library, finds the minimization of Watergate alarming.
“Nixon knew what he was doing was wrong,” he said, which is why Nixon constructed a coverup. Castigating those who stood in his way as “the deep state,” Mr. Naftali said, reflects a troubling shift.
“It fits the Trump, JD Vance view of the deep state that is, apparently, any institution that keeps presidents from committing any abuse of power or crimes,” he said.
Multiple measures were put in place in the years after Nixon’s resignation to hedge against abuse of presidential power and to guard the independence of the Justice Department and agencies such as the Internal Revenue Service.
A decades-long legal debate ensued about whether those moves were an overcorrection that unduly constrained the chief executive. Past presidents, both Republicans and Democrats, have chafed at some of those measures. But Mr. Trump is pushing the bounds of his power like none of his predecessors, with little challenge from Congress and much approval from the Supreme Court, which granted him and future presidents broad immunity from prosecution for official actions.
Mr. Trump maintained a mutually appreciative relationship with Nixon, but he has noted that one difference between them is that the former president resigned in the face of impeachment, while Mr. Trump fought it. Twice. Since his re-election, Mr. Trump has been upfront about pursuing business interests while president and using the power of the government to punish enemies.
Mr. Naftali said time would tell if Americans ultimately are more accepting of such an unorthodox and unbound chief executive.
But as Mr. Vance’s comments reflect, in the current climate, Nixon might not have been — as he might have said — kicked around.
“What’s unfortunate is that a president could do what Nixon did and complete his second term,” Mr. Naftali said. “It’s not that Nixon looks better in retrospect, it’s that we look worse.”
