The reason Nixon is important for the right,” said Christopher Rufo, a conservative culture warrior who has advised Trump on dismantling the modern administrative state, “is that America has been essentially stuck in the year 1968.”
The progressive ideas that animated Nixon’s enemies now motivate the opposition to Trump, Rufo said, setting the stage for what he described as “a counter revolution.”The first step in that rebellion for the right, he said, was for conservatives to recapture the memory of their own heroes: “It is a way for conservatives to regain their self-confidence, and to reject delegating their self-perception to the left.”The White House welcomes the comparison between the two presidents.“President Nixon exposed the treachery of the Deep State and Fake News media,” White House spokesman Kush Desai said.“Decades later, President Trump has consistently, and successfully, fought against these same entrenched interests for the American people and put our country first every single day.”Nick Solheim, 29, began to notice an uptick in discussions about Nixon during the Biden administration.“I see this argument among young people going through our programs all the time about whether Nixon was all great or all bad,” said the CEO of American Moment, a conservative organisation dedicated to training right-of-centre policy staffers.“I’d say the consensus is a little bit of both.”Peyton Mikolayek, 19, regularly shows off her large collection of pins, posters, and other Nixon memorabilia to her nearly 500,000 followers on TikTok.“I get a lot of strange old men in my DMs,” said the rising junior at Johns Hopkins University, who said she leans liberal.“Maybe it’s just because I’m Gen Z, but there’s this certain emotional distance from his presidency,” Mikolayek said in explaining her interest in Nixon.Asking her about Watergate, she said, “is almost like asking someone what they think of the Teapot Dome scandal.”Mikolayek said she prefers a more complete picture of Nixon that includes the lows of Watergate, but also the highs of his accomplishments such as changing the voting age and Title IX.At the Nixon Library, Vance compared Nixon’s 1972 win to Trump’s latest victory, arguing that the coalitions that returned both Trump and Nixon to the White House were broadbased and more durable than the one that made Ronald Reagan president.
“Reagan could not have won his landslide in 2024,” Vance said because of national demographic change, before adding “Richard Nixon maybe could have.”
Both the right impeaching Bill Clinton in 1998 and the left impeaching Trump twice during his first term (and they’ll catch another case of impeachment fever if they win one or both houses of Congress in November), have made Watergate look far less tectonic than when it was sold to the American public by the DNC-MSM in the 1970s. As Glenn has written, “Recent Events Have Made Me Doubt the Entire Watergate Story:” Nixon’s Revenge.
— Christian Heiens 🏛 (@ChristianHeiens) July 19, 2026
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