More than half a century after Watergate led to Richard Nixon’s resignation, a new generation of Trump-era conservatives is rediscovering the 37th president and recasting him as a forerunner of the “America First” movement, the Wall Street Journal reported. Videos featuring archival footage of Nixon over rap music from artists such as Drake and Biggie Smalls have gone viral on Instagram and YouTube. Influencers wear ball caps, crew necks and fanny packs bearing messages such as “Pretty Girls for Nixon” and “Nixon Now More Than Ever.” Hats stamped with “Nixonmaxxing” sold out in a matter of hours earlier this year.
The Nixon Foundation has driven much of the shift by repackaging content from its archive into short-form clips. The foundation’s archive holds more than 46 million documents and 3,700 hours of recorded conversations. The clips, often less than a minute long, regularly attract millions of views on YouTube alone. In one black-and-white video, Nixon declares “I’m not a crook” as gangster rap plays in the background. One Instagram reel features Jon Hamm’s character on “Mad Men” describing Nixon as “the Abe Lincoln of California, a self-made man” before concluding: “Kennedy, I see a silver spoon. Nixon, I see myself.”
Jim Byron, the 33-year-old foundation president who most recently managed the National Archives for President Trump, said the foundation began planning in 2018 as it looked ahead to a series of 50th anniversaries of Nixon’s accomplishments. “We have 5½ years of 50th anniversaries,” Byron said. “How do we use those opportunities to tell the story?” When the foundation embraced short-form videos on Instagram and TikTok, “we really saw it explode,” he said.
The memes serve as a “gateway drug” to Nixon history, said Matthew Foldi, the 29-year-old editor of the conservative Washington Reporter. The Nixon Foundation gifted him a limited-run baseball cap with a Nixon silhouette delivering his V-sign. Foldi said he went back to the foundation weeks later to get more — his friends wanted their own.
The Journal reported that what began as nostalgia memes and revisionist essays by alternative intellectuals is now being echoed by the most powerful Republican politicians in the country. Vice President JD Vance spoke at the Nixon Library in Yorba Linda, California, last month. “I think that his historical legacy is enjoying a bit of a renaissance,” Vance said. “And I think deservedly so.” Vance also said that “if Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be like a 12-hour news story. The idea that it would have taken down a presidency is crazy.”
The Journal reported that the revisionist praise extends to questioning the legitimacy of Watergate itself. On an April 2024 show that received more than 18 million views on YouTube, Tucker Carlson alleged that Watergate had been a “deep-state coup” orchestrated by the CIA and FBI. Joe Rogan later repeated the claims on his podcast, arguing “the whole thing was set up by the government.”
Geoff Shepard, a former Nixon aide who transcribed the White House tapes, recalled being “furious” with the president at the time. Decades later, Shepard said in an interview, his view began to change as he examined original Watergate records, including internal memos detailing secret meetings between prosecutors and John Sirica, the federal judge who presided over the criminal trials. He also discovered prosecution memos detailing what he considers changing testimony from White House counsel John Dean.
Roger Stone, a Republican operative who has worked for both presidents and who has a photo-realistic image of Nixon tattooed on his back, said Trump has asked “a number of times” why Nixon resigned rather than fight it out. “Nixon was in fact brought down by the same deep state institutions that tried to bring down Trump,” Stone said.
Trump’s own fascination with Nixon dates back decades, the Journal reported. In 1982, less than eight years after Nixon resigned, Trump wrote to Nixon that he was “one of this country’s great men.” In more than a dozen letters between the two, Nixon encouraged Trump’s political ambitions as they bonded over common grievances. “Dear Donald — I know nothing about the intricacies of your business enterprises but the massive media attack on you puts me in your corner!” Nixon wrote in 1990.
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.”
Christopher Rufo, whom the Journal described as a conservative culture warrior who has advised Trump on dismantling the modern administrative state, told the Journal that the Nixon rehabilitation is part of a broader effort to reclaim conservative history. “The reason Nixon is important for the right,” Rufo said, “is that America has been essentially stuck in the year 1968.” He described the current moment as “a counter revolution” and said the effort is “a way for conservatives to regain their self-confidence, and to reject delegating their self-perception to the left.”
Nixon’s appeal among young conservatives is rooted in populist nostalgia, according to the Journal. Shashank Tripathi, a conservative pundit known online as Comfortably Smug, described Nixon as a “heterodox middle finger to the establishment” and said, “That’s the entry for the young folks.”
The Journal reported that the movement to soften Nixon’s image also questions the post-Watergate reforms that established stronger checks on presidential power. In his second term, Trump has moved to roll back many of those restraints, challenging limits on presidential spending power, firing inspectors general and testing protections for career civil servants.