Vance and Rufo Want You to Know That Nixon Is Back, Baby, and He’s Better Than Ever

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IF THEY COULD HELP IT, most national Republican politicians used to avoid discussions of Richard Milhous Nixon or Watergate, the scandal that led to his resignation. Nixon was a stain on the Republican brand; later in his life, he was at best treated deferentially as a wizened elder statesman, never as a hero.1 But two weeks ago, Vice President JD Vance fully embraced the legacy of the controversial president while speaking at the Nixon Library, just steps away from the Californian’s birthplace and gravesite in Yorba Linda.

“If Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be, like, a twelve-hour news story,” Vance declared. He wasn’t just making a point about modern media, either. Vance made it clear that he believed “the deep state took down Richard Nixon.” In case the message wasn’t obvious, he added, “It’s 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.” In this telling, one gaining credence on the right, Watergate was not a moment where the nation’s institutions held and stopped a corrupt executive; it was the upshot of a conspiracy to take down a successful right-wing president staring down the establishment.

Vance also proudly welcomed comparisons between his own life in politics and the man many liberals, and some conservatives, too, knew as “Tricky Dick.”

“At a personal level, you know, okay: Young senator, vice president, writes some bestselling books, is hated by the media, it kind of sounds like JD Vance,” he said. For good measure, he later added, “I’ve always liked Richard Nixon.”

The remarks became national news, with many surprised that the vice president would praise the only president in U.S. history to resign. But Vance’s comments are part of a growing trend of right-wingers who believe that Nixon is “a lodestar for 21st-century Right-wing counterculture.” The Nixon Foundation recently launched a social media campaign to help rehabilitate the former president’s legacy; its posts have included hype edits, memes, favorable excerpts from interviews, and merch inscribed with the term “Nixonmaxxing” (a nod to the right-wing “looksmaxxing” subculture). Writing for Unherd two weeks ago, the postliberal academic Nathan Pinkoski declared that “a Nixon clip and a colorful quote from the tapes is more likely to go viral than an elegantly delivered, carefully crafted phrase from Ronald Reagan.” Nixon’s anger, awkward personality, and willingness to declare war on his enemies are a better match for the politics of 2026 than the smoothly polished Gipper.

While most of the country still disapproves of his presidency, an increasing number of influential media figures on the right have flattened Nixon’s complex personality and legacy. In their simplifying reduction, he’s become a right-wing martyr in the forever war against the liberal establishment.

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For decades, the overwhelming bipartisan consensus was that Nixon’s attempts to obstruct justice were worthy of impeachment. Following the release of the White House tapes and the discovery that the president was at the center of a massive campaign to use the federal government to attack his political enemies, most Americans agreed that when he resigned, “the system had worked.” Conspiracy theories about Watergate, such as speculations about the involvement of the CIA or some other shady organization or figures, could be found on both the right and the left, but they failed to gain traction in the mainstream. When Frank Gannon, a former Nixon aide, asked the former president in 1983 if he believed that a CIA conspiracy led to his removal from office, the president refused to commit to an answer. However, he noticeably did not dismiss the narrative, saying, with a wry smile “I’m not prepared to say whether to say there was a conspiracy or not. I would only say that it should make a fascinating study for an investigative reporter.” Lingering suspicions about the end of his presidency would contribute to a boon in Nixon revisionism during the age of Trump.

Rethinking Nixon isn’t strictly new. In fact, the man himself encouraged it throughout his career.

Nixon alumni like Watergate burglar G. Gordon Liddy and Pat Buchanan would occasionally defend the “old man” during their media appearances, but they were minority voices that did little to weaken the public’s perception of Nixon’s well-documented abuses of power. During the late twentieth century, the first wave of Nixon revisionism focused on his liberal domestic policies and his pathbreaking diplomacy with China and the Soviet Union. That partial rehabilitation is in stark contrast to the way younger conservatives now are not only celebrating Nixon as a symbol of right-wing toughness but are also holding up his darker moments as a guide for the future of their movement. In the parlance of the youthful right, Nixon has become “based.”

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WHAT DOES IT MEAN that the president who was forced out of office for his abuses of power in 1974 is having a moment in 2026? And how much will it matter?

Trump’s first term sparked a new wave of distrust toward the federal government and the mainstream media. There seemed to be obvious parallels between current events and the Watergate era: Liberals hoped that Robert Mueller’s investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia would produce another scandal that would bring down a corrupt president. Crimes were discovered, and aides to Trump were penalized, but unlike Nixon, Trump survived. “Russiagate” led to cries of “lawfare” on the right, and soon conservatives like Tucker Carlson were encouraging their viewers to revisit Watergate, the justice of which had never quite been fully accepted in all corners of the hard right.

In a 2018 event held at the Nixon Library, Carlson told an audience of Nixon supporters that he had recently come to believe he had been lied to about Watergate. Over the years, first on his former primetime show on Fox News and then on his online interview series, Carlson has explicitly stated that he thinks that Watergate was a deep-state coup. The former Fox host hadn’t always been a Nixon-defender, but these days, it’s a cause he likes to flog, even convincing Joe Rogan that the deep state had taken down the man who won the 1972 election in a landslide.

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The future of Nixon celebration on the modern right may ultimately depend on the future prospects of JD Vance, the most Nixonian of the current crop of potential successors to Trump. The millennial vice president first outed himself as a Nixon booster at the National Conservatism conference in 2021, where he delivered a thirty-minute speech decrying higher education. After heaping praise on Nixon speechwriter Pat Buchanan, the then, Senate candidate from Ohio smirkingly quoted the Nixon tapes as a kind of inspirational material to conclude his remarks. “There is a wisdom in what Richard Nixon said. . . . the professors are the enemy,” he declared. The provocative quote was his mic-drop moment; it elicited rapturous applause. Vance won his Senate election in 2022; now the young Nixonian is a heartbeat away from the presidency.

While Vance’s speech received some attention at the time, few recognized its significance as longstanding resentments over Watergate began creeping into the conservative mainstream.

One of the right’s most influential activists, Christopher Rufo, has become a passionate advocate for Nixon over the last few years. In a ten-minute video released in 2023 and titled “Nixon Forever,” Rufo insisted the right should follow Nixon’s “blueprint for counter-revolution,” which entailed fighting back against ideologically compromised institutions by moving to “radically reshape the federal bureaucracy.” During an appearance on Real Time with Bill Maher, Rufo added that Nixon was merely a fall guy for Watergate and that he would be vindicated by 2035. The Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles has reached a similar conclusion.

Rufo champions Nixon for the former president’s overheated worldview. He believes the right can learn more about defeating the influence of the left from Nixon’s efforts to aggressively dismantle the New Left than from the likes of Reagan or any other Republican president. For people like Rufo, who see DEI coordinators as modern-day Leninist revolutionaries, it really is “Nixon: now more than ever.”

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After the assassination of Charlie Kirk in September 2025, and the subsequent fissures that widened on the right, Rufo re-emphasized his claim that the American people needed a new Nixon amid violent culture war. That November, Rufo argued on Substack that Vance could replicate Nixon’s success at managing internal splits within the rightwing coalition, reminding readers that Nixon also “dealt with the problems of racialism and conspiracism within the Right,” and that he eventually “learned how to manage a coalition, win the presidency, and win reelection in a 49-state landslide.”

In 1962, Nixon lost his campaign to become governor of California. One of the contributing factors in this defeat, arguably, was his decision to condemn the John Birch Society, a conspiratorial anti-Communist group popular in the conservative bastions of Southern California. Rufo points out that Nixon learned an important lesson from this loss and abandoned the policy of “denunciation and repudiation” in response to liabilities to the right. Thereafter, Nixon instead “threaded the needle” by “calmly and coolly” portraying the society “as a spent force” without getting hysterical about the threat it still poses. Rufo then writes that, with Nixon as his guide, Vance is skilled enough to make the same strategic moves as a way to “maintain strategic distance” from the more politically toxic elements of today’s right while nevertheless winning over their followers.

Both Rufo and Vance appear to see greater value in using Nixon’s re-election strategy as a contemporary model rather than Reagan’s. “Some of my political data guys who are very into this have drilled into me: Nixon’s coalition in ’72 is actually durable and much more closely resembles the Trump coalition of 2024 than the Reagan Coalition of ’84,” said Vance at the Nixon Library. Arguing that Reagan’s landslide depended on white voters, Vance suggested Nixon’s electoral victory, by virtue of its size and his success with white ethnics (roughly analogized to Latino voters today), was more sustainable in a demographically diverse country. “Reagan could not have won his landslide in 2024. Richard Nixon maybe could have won his landslide in 2024,” Vance noted, adding, “He was actually a political genius, and I’m just fascinated by the guy as a historical figure.”

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WHETHER VANCE IS RIGHT OR WRONG on the merits is beside the point. Nixon’s underrated political talents are not all that’s behind the wave of right-wing revisionism about his presidency. A substratum of social media accounts celebrate Nixon’s surreptitiously recorded racist, sexist, and antisemitic remarks as the kind of transgressive truth-telling ready to be deployed against both DEI and Israel that has made him the preferred president of terminally online right. “Enthusiasm for Nixon revisionism is a pretty good heuristic for identifying high quality right wing accounts,” wrote one prominent poster.

Finally, what links together those drawn to both Nixon and alternative histories of Watergate is his willingness to use the federal government to crack down on the right’s enemies and strengthen their ability to control the nation’s institutions. As Trump, Vance, and a Republican party have become enamored with the powers of the impoundment, Schedule F, and the unitary executive theory, they are cheering the return to an imperial presidency, one far beyond the historical Nixon’s comparatively constrained vision of the office’s powers.

While Ronald Reagan adopted similar themes in his campaigns and presidency and was in many ways more provocative than Nixon, he seems positively passé when compared with his predecessor. Nixon’s edge, his embattled dyspepsia, his willingness to think in terms of enemies, and his hatred of elites make him the preferred model for a generation of Republicans who see themselves as eternal underdogs in an endless ideological fight. Reagan never left behind candid (and memeable) tapes that remind younger conservatives of the depth and authenticity of his determination to destroy the liberal establishment.

The Nixon tapes led to the end of Nixon’s presidency. They are now inspiring younger conservatives, like the vice president, to enlist themselves to fight Tricky Dick’s final campaign.

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Michael Koncewicz is the associate director of the Institute for Public Knowledge at NYU. He is the author of They Said No to Nixon: Republicans Who Stood Up to the President’s Abuses of Power, and is currently working on a biography of Tom Hayden.

1By mainstream Republicans, at least.