NIXON’S THE ONE! NOW MORE THAN EVER! NBC News gets the vapors over “The campaign to make Richard Nixon great again:”
Beyond [Christopher] Rufo, the conservative media personalities Tucker Carlson, Michael Knowles and Steve Bannon have pushed this revisionist Watergate narrative in the past year. Hillsdale College, a conservative college in Michigan, promoted and endorsed a Carlson podcast episode that described Watergate as a “scam.” Even actor Bill Murray suggested this year on Joe Rogan’s podcast that Nixon might have been “framed.”
Republican-controlled states like Idaho and Louisiana have approved a video for use in public school social studies classes that was produced by the conservative media organization PragerU, in which the conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt quotes a historian who argues that Watergate was the media’s attempt to reverse an election.
Hewitt, who serves on the board of the Nixon Foundation, contends that the media and the “East Coast liberal elite” had it out for Nixon in part because of his “staunch anti-communist” views.
PragerU worked over the past two years with many Republican-led states to get its content into public schools, and it recently partnered with the Trump administration on a civics education initiative. After Rufo’s proclamation on HBO, Marissa Streit, PragerU’s CEO, said he is “right about Nixon!” and directed people to watch Hewitt’s video on X.
Woodrow Wilson was invariably presented as a “Progressive” giant for decades before it was obvious he was so terrible a president (and man) that reality eventually began to catch up. But Wilson aside, every 20th century president has a team working to enhance his reputation. And sometimes, they can produce astonishing results for their man. Harry Truman left office with poll numbers absolutely underwater, but a cadre of Democrat historians made it their life goal to depict him as an absolute titan among presidents, and their efforts stuck. Amity Shlaes has done yeoman’s work to boost Calvin Coolidge’s stature. In his later years, even Jimmy Carter got into the act, beginning with Ezra Klein’s 2009 efforts to salvage the reputation of his infamous “malaise speech.”
As for Nixon, it was Democrats themselves who began to prop up his reputation, beginning decades ago, in part to attack the then-current Republican president. Timesmen Paul Krugman and Thomas Wicker each praised Nixon for his Rockefeller Republican big government “echo not a choice” worldview, and in 2008, Roger Ebert similarly rehabilitated Nixon to attack Dubya. That was 16 years before Kamala desperately sought GWB’s endorsement last year, as a reminder how the left’s eternal cycle of Republican presidential rehabilitation works.
But it was with their never-ending efforts at impeaching Trump during his first term that arguably did the most to tilt the needle for Nixon. Because the last time impeachment hearings occurred against a president was in 1868 against Andrew Johnson, the Democrats’ assault on Nixon could be presented by their operatives with bylines as blockbuster, once in a century stuff. The Republicans’ impeachment effort against Clinton was a reminder that these are simply partisan efforts at smashmouth politics, and the left’s continuous meltdown over Trump cemented this perception among everyone except those with terminal cases of TDS.