Subject: Vance tells a truth!
Relax people. Just get used to the rampant corruption. Vote JD Vance!

While sitting inside the library of the only president ever forced to resign over abuse of power, Vance declared that Nixon’s “historical legacy is enjoying a bit of a renaissance, and I think deservedly so.” He then argued that if Watergate happened today, it would amount to “like a 12-hour news story,” calling it “crazy” that the scandal ever brought down a presidency. From there, he claimed that the same type of “deep state” institutions that brought down Nixon also tried to bring down Donald Trump in his first presidency, before comparing himself to Nixon, saying they were both young senators, vice presidents, bestselling authors, hated by the media, and concluding, “I’ve always liked Richard Nixon.”

In trying to romanticize Richard Nixon’s corruption, J.D. Vance took it further, making the strongest case yet for just how far America’s standards for presidential misconduct have fallen. Because the Vice President of the United States wasn’t simply defending Richard Nixon. He was asking Americans to view Watergate, once considered the defining presidential scandal in modern history, as something so insignificant by today’s standards that it would barely survive a single news cycle. It was a direct attempt to redefine what Americans should and should not consider presidential misconduct.

And that’s the part he didn’t realize he was admitting. Because if Watergate would barely make the news today, then what he’s really saying is that the scandals surrounding Donald Trump have become so much larger, so much more constant, and so all-consuming that the crime which once brought down a president would now barely interrupt the news cycle. Nixon’s corruption didn’t become smaller. Our tolerance for presidential corruption became much larger because Donald Trump keeps pushing the boundaries of what Americans are expected to accept.

What the Vice President said was an accidental confession about just how dramatically the standards of American democracy have eroded.


Heather Delaney Reese

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