Building on Paul’s discussion of Vance embracing Richard Nixon from the other day. A couple of days before that, a friend of mine sent me this Vanity Fair article on the attempt to rehabilitation Nixon through social media. I find it all very strange:

Richard Nixon throws up his hands in exasperation as he addresses the press: “People have got to know whether or not their president is a crook,” he says in the 1973 clip. “Well, I’m not a crook. I’ve earned everything I’ve got.”

Suddenly, rapper EsDeeKid’s song “Rottweiler” comes in at full blast.

Okay, yo, ayy
Too much snow, kid, coming like Canada
Got kush smoke all in me lungs, I’m running from plod, but I’m lacking the stamina

More Nixon clips flood in. He chuckles, salutes, and waves merrily to the crowd. In one snippet, he’s swallowed by a crowd of fans. The words “I’m not a crook” flash across the screen. His face lights up with an X-ray filter before the seal of the Richard Nixon Foundation shines on the screen.

The caption reads: “The people have got to know.” The reel, shown below, has been seen over 1.4 million times and shared by thousands of people.

And….

The Foundation appears to at least tacitly go along with this popular rebrand. Tim Naftali, who served as the first federal director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library, says that the Foundation has long embraced a conspiratorial view of Watergate, but it’s taken several decades before they could spread their theories to people who may not know of Nixon at all.

“At the time I was the Nixon Library director, they were making the same arguments,” says Naftali. “They’re not new, but they found a new platform, and they’ve found a new audience.”

During his tenure from 2007 to 2011, Naftali oversaw the release of 1.3 million pages of documents, nearly 700 hours of Nixon tapes, and the creation of the Watergate Gallery. For years, he has been vocal about the pushback he encountered when trying to erect the exhibit, though the Foundation has long refuted his claims: “Numerous reports about the troubles former Nixon Library director Dr. Timothy Naftali supposedly had to endure from the Nixon Foundation over his more than three-year effort to produce a new Watergate exhibit are entirely unfounded,” they wrote in a statement in 2012.

While Naftali sought to open the exhibit, Nixon loyalists filed a 132-page letter of objection to the National Archives and Records Administration. This held up the opening of the exhibit for months. During one private tour of the facility, Naftali says he was berated by a group of these loyalists—including Nixon’s brother, Edward Nixon. According to Naftali, the group told him to “get the hell out.” The ordeal ultimately took its toll: He resigned as museum director just eight months after the new exhibit finally opened.

Naftali says that young people—especially young, white men—-might relate to Nixon because they, too, see themselves as victims. (“Every disgruntled yet ambitious neurodivergent American man has a bit of Nixon in him,” reads one comment.) The Foundation, he says, is simply tapping into that insecurity.

“It’s zeitgeisty at a moment where we have a president who is the most powerful person in the world, and yet he wants us to believe he’s a victim,” he adds.

One can overstate some things from reading this. First, something being shared on social media thousands of times doesn’t really mean that much today. That can easily happen through the slightest bit of coordination. Second, the number of people paying attention to this–or anything political–in any kind of media is really very small. Remember the poll from recently that showed that 9% of Democrats had even heard of Ezra Klein’s Prosperity Agenda and yet it has consumed so much bandwidth in Democratic online spaces. Third, it’s entirely possible that some young men are seeing this stuff about Nixon and feeling like he’s them, but the chances are very high that if they are getting this far, they are already all the way there anyway.

So, aging, we can overstate it all. But it does tell us one thing very important–today’s right wingers see Richard Nixon as a hero, they want everyone to see Richard Nixon as a hero, and they intend to act like Richard Nixon in the future and they will do whatever they have to do to make this all possible. Bug the Democratic Party HQ? Commit massive crimes? Oh hell yes, that’s the best. Especially when you have the Roberts Court to back you up. That alone should be alarming for their plans in 2028 and beyond. 2026 too, maybe, they are far too disorganized.

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