“Nixonmaxxing”?

Recent reporting in the Wall Street Journal shares news of young conservative men, led by Joe Rogan and JD Vance, reviving and reclaiming (and warping) the memory of Richard Nixon. We are in a season of national Presidential amnesia, understandable given the daily blast of lies, profanities, vanities and cruelties of the Felon-In-Chief. We live in a moment when recollection of George W. Bush’s legacy—two endless wars based on lies and an unprecedented (and criminal) regime of torture—has melted into a lukewarm image of the guy who paints himself in a bathtub.

Human memory being what it is, it’s almost easy to see the past as rosier. Ask Hitler.

But Richard Nixon, complex as he was, should be clearly understood as almost as full of hate and envy as the current White House occupant, save for one thing: Nixon, like all his predecessors and all but one of his successors, had a sense of shame. The pettiness, the bitter prejudices and—worst of all, the firm and bald decision to prolong a war until after a re-election campaign—all were confined to a zone of privacy, to be known only after a court ordered the release of Nixon’s private audio tapes.

That’s not a minor difference with the current offender, whose superpower, since his days as a loudmouth real-estate promoter and frequent bankruptee, has been shamelessness. But in private, as revealed on the hundreds of tapes I’ve heard, Nixon’s hatreds, his untamed bitterness in the face of victory, his ironclad prejudices all preclude, or should, any kind of “maxxing”. When JD Vance, for one example, says that if Watergate happened today it would be a one-day news story, he is only engaging in a weird form of buttering up the boss, assuring him of his uniqueness as an historical villain.

Fairness requires acknowledging that Nixon was smarter than Trump. But fairness admits that’s not a high bar. Young conservatives aching to ape a past GOP leader might want to aim a bit higher. Wasn’t Lincoln a Republican?

(Some of Nixon’s creepier and weirder private moments are recreated in my 6-part series “Nixon’s the One”, available on YouTube)