I’m always alert to historical analogies, and the cult of Nixon isn’t a new one for MAGA folk, but it’s telling J.D. Vance is embracing it, as I noted at New York:

One of the odder quirks of MAGA movement devotees is a decided soft spot for Richard Nixon. That’s right: the disgraced 37th president of the United States, forced to resign to avoid almost certain impeachment and removal from office, is a not-so-secret heartthrob for devotees of the 45th and 47th president.

During the 2024 presidential campaign, Vivek Ramaswamy raised some eyebrows by insisting that Nixon (you know, the president who opened diplomatic relations with Red China, promoted détente with the Soviet Union, and perpetuated a forever war in Vietnam) had forged the original America First foreign policy. He was far from alone in his nostalgia for The Tricky One. Highly influential culture warrior Christopher Rufo has treated Nixon as Trump’s progenitor on a broad range of issues, from law-and-order appeals to the demonization of academia and the liberal media, with special emphasis on Nixon’s battles with the federal bureaucracy he inherited from the New Deal and Great Society initiatives:

“The question that troubled Nixon during his presidency was the basic one of politics: Who rules? He saw that the deepest conflict in the United States was not along lines of class, race, or identity but between the bureaucracy and the people.”

Rufo is one of multiple right-wing theoreticians to view the Watergate scandal that brought Nixon down as a “coup” by leftist elites rather than the product of Nixon’s own arrogance, hubris, and paranoia. The parallels to the alleged persecution of poor, brave Donald Trump are as obvious as they are ludicrous to people outside the MAGA cult.

So it’s not too surprising that a politician who wants to be viewed as the living embodiment of the post-Trump MAGA movement, J.D. Vance, is going out of his way to identify with Nixon. As part of his tour promoting his latest memoir (that’s now two for the 41-year-old veep), Vance stopped off at the Nixon Presidential Library in California and offered some pithy thoughts on Nixon, Trump, and himself, as the Associated Press reported:

“Vice President JD Vance on Thursday said the Watergate scandal that brought down President Richard Nixon would have been a blip in today’s news cycle, and he drew parallels between Nixon and President Donald Trump — arguing that both were targeted by ‘deep state’ forces. …

“’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,’ Vance said.”

That’s the “coup” hypothesis in a nutshell. It suggests that today’s environment, in which the president says things every hour that would have destroyed the reputation of his predecessors, is what’s normal.

But Vance did something interesting that went beyond comparing Trump to Nixon. He compared himself to Nixon:

“’Young senator, vice president, writes some bestselling books, is hated by the media,’ he said. ‘It kind of sounds like JD Vance. I’ve always liked Richard Nixon.’”

There are indeed some superficial similarities. Both were 39 years old and less than two years into a Senate term when they were tapped for vice presidential nominations by presidential candidates who wanted some youth on the ticket to balance their own advancing years. Both were thought to represent the most conservative wing of their conservative party. But beyond that, the Nixon-Vance identification is a reach. Nixon didn’t write any “bestselling books” until after he lost the 1960 presidential election and was reinventing himself for another bid in 1968. Vance wasn’t always “hated by the media;” indeed, he was a media darling when Hillbilly Elegy was first published. Nixon developed a reputation for foreign policy chops as vice president. So far Vance’s big foreign policy accomplishments are lecturing Europeans to be nicer to the fascists in their midst, and serving as errand boy in negotiations with Iran that may yet come a cropper.

But the more significant thing at the moment is that Vance wants to be seen as the New Nixon, embracing the mantle of a man who might have done prison time had his successor not pardoned him in an act that probably cost Gerald Ford reelection in 1976. Perhaps this is Vance’s way of assuring MAGA folk that despite his time rubbing elbows with billionaires on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley, and his charmed political life, he’s still a bad boy and a bad-ass at heart. The current veep has a ways to go in forming a clear persona for his presumed 2028 presidential bid. But he might well settle on depicting himself as a hillbilly who’s done good just like Dick Nixon, the classic middle-class striver who bested his snooty disparagers and obtained supreme power.