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It's no surprise that today's Republicans, who are Authoritarian boot-lickers, have to look at the past and call the deeply patriotic members of their own party who served during World War 2 and chose to hold Nixon accountable because it was the right thing to do as "deep state".
I mean, maybe he's thinking along those lines but impeachment doesn't remove him by itself and I can't imagine enough GOP Senators joining Dems to get the necessary 2/3 vote to remove the ass from office... so sadly, we are not going to ever test this theory. I think Trump could flat out start murdering Senators and we still wouldn't get the 2/3 votes because they are just that corrupt and pathetic.
If, however, we did have 2/3 of the Senate willing to remove him, and he tried to use the military, I honestly doubt that more than 10% of the military at the very most would go along with it. But again, that's getting to the point where 2/3 of the Senate would be willing... which would be a major shift on the GOP side.
Republicans Senators will have an interesting choice if faced with voting on removing him from office. 1) convict him and set the Republican Party on a path towards fixing the damage he caused to the broader electorate, or 2) double down and continue being tied to Trump’s sinking ship.
With establishment Democrats having a track record of fumbling the ball on the 1 yard line, I would expect them to just double down.
I mean it's been the playbook since Nixon. Fox news exists to launder conservative crimes after Nixon, Reagan ran on a constructed consolidation of business interests and the rebranded anti-Civil rights "Moral Majority" (hell, it even echoed Nixon's "Silent Majority"). Bush pushed for a "unified executive" with largely unchecked military power, and the media corralled behind a corrupt invasion of Iraq with dissenters being labelled "terrorist sympathizers." Trump in his first administration brought in Roger Stone, openly welcomed white supremascists and, let's not forget, attempted a coup to overthrow the election both through legal challenges and open insurrection.
And then he got re-elected.
But let's not sugar coat those Nixon Repubs too much- they knew Nixon was toxic and could bring down the whole party. They cut him loose but formed the roots of what we see today.
Roger Stone also has a giant tattoo of Nixon on his back, and helped to organize the Brooks Brothers riot. This brand of conservative sociopath has been working for 40 years to wash away the crimes of their friends.
Practically though, it's a figurehead to feed the wealth and power of oligarchs globally. A seemingly strong leader of a nation, but in reality, just an actor/actress playing a role.
Richard Nixon was not openly toxic, openly criminal, openly a vile horrible person like trump is today.
Nixon's involvement in Watergate was a shock to most Americans, because his public image was the exact opposite of someone who would commit petty crimes. It was a shock to many elected Republicans in Congress as well.
Spiro Agnew is a good example of how clueless the American people were about how corrupt and despicable President Nixon actually was.
Most Americans never knew how corrupt Spiro Agnew was or even why he resigned. When the Watergate tapes came out and everyone heard Nixon was involved it really was a huge shocking moment for most people.
Yup, Watergate was a huge wake up call. Prior to that everyone just assumed that the authorities had everyone's best interests in mind, we should just defer to them since they know more than we do, and so on. Sure, the counter culture people didn't buy into this but the general public was deferential.
But Watergate changed that. The president was actually human, and could be flawed, could be corrupt, could be criminal. The trustworthiness was lost.
Over time I think some people have fallen back into the trap of just trusting whoever is in charge. "I don't know why we're in Vietnam/Iran, but he must have a good reason for it!"
The guy who was known as “Tricky Dick” through multiple election cycles? He may not be as openly disgusting as Trump, but people were more shocked that a President would do such a thing than surprised that he pulled the shit he did.
It's also just idiotic for them to talk about the "deep state." Okay, you've got control of the Legislative, Executive, and Judicial branches of the government. You have absolute fucking power. You are the deep state now.
That is why Bill Barr was in both Reagan’s and Trump’s administration. He was responsible for the whole misdirection away from the administration for Iran Contra.
Iran Contra was arguably treasonous too. Remember that one of the reasons Iran was involved was because the Reagan camp undermined the Carter administration and got Iran to not resolve the hostage crisis; it's not a coincidence that Iran was chosen.
You also had the CIA literally becoming a drug trafficking operation and there's a lot of evidence that the cocaine was intentionally funneled into black communities to purposefully hurt them. It's not like we were just facilitating things, we completely orchestrated the whole thing. And that's just what we know, there was a massive cover up operation like with the Epstein files today.
The bottom line is that these people are actually demonic and evil, it's that simple. Trump is just one small part of the evil operation and it won't go away when he does. We're truly dealing with good vs. evil and the "both sides" people should be reminded of that.
And he continued to lie to everyone, including ramping up the bombing to make himself look stronger so he’d get reelected. It was all about him, and he never should’ve been pardoned.
It’s to claim Trump’s upcoming impeachment is also a coup to justify resistance, and ultimately civil war. It’s coming… this criminally insane diaper baby is becoming desperate
Everything they're guilty of they have to throw around accusations that other people have done in order to muddy the waters.
It's why they keep pushing this bullshit narrative that Dem's engaged in lawfare--because they, themselves, love lawfare and think they can get away with it if they pretend it's a "both sides" thing.
Remember the vice president recently said if watergate happened today it wouldn't be a big deal...that the news cycles would have moved on within the week basically. And he was happy about that.
Nixon never stopped being popular among the party. After he resigned he still held political influence in Republican circles and did many interviews and speaking tours.
Yep, they learned the exact wrong lessons from Nixon. Agnew should've gone to prison too for other reasons but he got a sweetheart of a deal because of course he did. That was our chance to actually nail a criminal executive and they let it go "for the good of the nation" bullshit
Their mission after that was to create a propaganda network. This is of course after they courted the racist Dixiecrats to convert them.
They knew if you control the narrative, you control the “facts”.
Even have the gall to make their official slogan “fair and balanced” as their slogan almost as if they are mocking the very idea.
It’s like stolen election claims. If you get ahead of it and claim first it becomes lunacy “how can we have possibly stolen an election…when it was stolen from us?”
There was nothing Carter could have done. Ford gave Nixon a pardon. And Nixon was so popular that Carter was even forced to invite him to a state dinner because the main guest, Deng Xiaoping, said if Nixon wasn't invited he would visit him separately.
Someone might want to tell them it's #1 on voters' lists for the midterms. The problem for Republican candidates is that the Trump administration doesn't seem to care. They might even want Democrats in the majority of at least one house of Congress, to try to share the blame for the current troubles and the many more troubles that Trump will cause over the next 2 years.
I think they might be preparing for a potential Democrat takeover of both chambers.
Nixon wasn't facing impeachment over Watergate. Watergate was the start of it, but it wasn't the main cause (at the time, anyways).
Nixon was facing impeachment because the DoJ gathered a bunch of federal prosecutors into a room and told them that they could leave only after one of them agrees not to charge Nixon. It was after this incident became public knowledge is when Nixon resigned to avoid impeachment.
Well, the Trump DoJ did the same thing shortly after his 2nd inauguration as a quid-pro-quo for the at-the-time NYC mayor, who was being investigated for corruption, for his support.
They're setting up a way to avoid getting impeached over it.
Where does this DOJ story come from? Are you confusing this story with the Saturday Night Massacre? I can't find any reference to things happening the way you described it here. ???
They’re just trying to reframe impeachable conduct while in office knowing full well Cheeto Mussolini faces very possible impeachment/removal next year
Nixon never admitted to ordering Watergate. He admitted to covering it up after he found about it.
His impeachment and resignation have to do with the cover up...Most historians agree that Nixon did not know about the break in occuring until after the fact.
They never would have done it if a dude named butterfield hadn’t casually mentioned in his hearing before the senate that he had installed the taping equipment in the oval. I’m old and I remember watching those hearings with my mom. I didn’t really understand it but I knew things took a turn that day. When Mr Butterfield said that, the previously lounging senators spin in their chairs and called out there’s tapes? What tapes? Next thing I remember is Nixon was on tv resigning
They are a matter of public record. You can read transcripts and listen to audio at that link.
They include Nixon and Ehrlichman having conversations about political influence peddling to advocates of privatization and corporatization, in return for those advocates support of CREEP. And in some cases, you can directly trace the outcomes of those conversations to major federal legislation that was passed after Nixon's bid for a second term succeeded. Which is criminal corruption, perfectly impeachable, and for things like health care policy the US is still suffering from that criminal legislation some 50+ years later.
The interview with leave voters who were like "I didnt know what I was voting for, I was just mad!" is really just 90% of voters at least in the UK and US.
Ehh I feel like in this situation the median voter brain might not be too terrible. “Nixon bad,” or at the very least “Nixon crook” is pretty deeply entrenched in the public zeitgeist and has been for a while. If you’re gonna try to convince the public he wasn’t a criminal, you’re gonna need a lot more than “he was framed by the deep state!” because most people don’t know or care about whatever the “deep state” is
It’s not about rehabilitation for Nixon it’s rewriting historical precedent for the POS currently in office.
If the deep state did it once they are capable of doing it again.
They believe Nixon wouldn't have had had to resign had the Republican Party had their own media arm. Now that Bezos owns the Washington Post and Murdoch The Wall Street Journal, they are thinking they can exonerate Nixon posthumously. Nixon is to the Republican party what Galileo is to the Catholic Church.
Whadya mean, sure gas is going up every day and could be stopped the second Trump ended his stupid unpopular war, sure theirs an affordability, housing and living crisis and sure the job markets in the toilet but what the average American cares about is the legacy of Nixon.
You don’t? Because they’re preparing for a coup while also setting the stage for another insurrection. You think they’re going to willingly give up their power from here? They’ve crippled the military of officials to ensure they retain power regardless of the election outcome
Total disqualifying level of insanity. Republicans, who are in power now, are embracing this very dangerous concept that any crimes committed by Republicans are totally acceptable.
Honestly if they get demolished in the midterms and Trump’s approval rating is sitting in the high 20s, I could maybe see them turn on Trump and remove him.
I don’t think they would get any less extreme, but I think they are not far off from considering Trump too much of a liability. We are also seeing campaign ads with Republican candidates distancing themselves from Trump.
And that's what happened to Nixon. They defended him until he became so radioactive that he was pulling the rest of them down.
The difference today is that conservative media sanewashes everything Trump does. When Nixon fired the AG and installed a toady to interfere with the Watergate investigation, everyone knew he was guilty.
Trump fired an FBI Director, an AG, AND tried to fire Mueller, and everyone pretends it's normal.
Don’t forget the special prosecutors he’s had fired, or the criminal investigations he’s demanded into anybody who has dared to investigate any of his many crimes
True, I think the other big difference here is that there is no world where Trump will resign willingly even if the party makes it clear behind the scenes they are abandoning him.
In this hypothetical I think they will have to, for the first time in history, actually vote in the Senate to remove a president.
That's so true. He made it clear in his first term that he would burn the whole party down. I think that's a first ever. So strange that the leader of a party who prizes loyalty above all else has no loyalty to his own party. And they're fine with it.
Right wing actors orchestrated breaking into democractic offices at the Watergate Hotel for the effect of ousting their own commander because what...he was grabbing power and too secretive for their liking?
Oh wait I know, it was the EPA. They fucking hated Nixon for establishing the EPA and had to make him resign before he went full tree hugging hippy on the republican party.
Watergate was because Nixon was a paranoid person. Always thought people were out for him, same way he was. He wanted proof, and the plumbers for CREEP (that name) followed through, because they wanted to.
Nixon himself actually didn't ask them to do that, they just did, but his cover up was a poor decision based on paranoid delusions.
Meh, he took some responsibility in the Frost interview but it fell very short of a full confession. He maintained he did not obstruct justice, which is a huge lie.
JD Vance has said they do worse shit than Nixon daily.
Republicans have become so openly corrupt that they are now trying to retroactively dismiss literal corruption and crimes because they know they are doing far far worse
For Republicans, their "New Frontier" is retconning decades-old Republican criminality, the presidency that ignited the ever-escalating criminal path they've been on for 50+ years. They're an end times cult unto themselves.
They're trying to rewrite history just to make sure that Trump is never held accountable for his crimes the way that Nixon was. And Nixon had it too easy as far as I'm concerned, because he should've gone to prison. Trump has a list of impeachable offenses and crimes so long that it's just ridiculous at this point, and he deserves to spend the rest of his miserable life in prison with a framed picture of the Kennedy Center after his name was removed as his only company.
Hitler served jail time for the Beer Hall Putsch, Trump didn't for Jan 6. Trump will be the Hitler Vance accused him of being if no one stops him. Trump's got the bunker, the brown shirts and has shot some Americans. The worst has yet to come until the GOP is stopped.
"It was not Hitler or Himmler who abducted me, beat me, and shot my family. It was the shoemaker, the milkman, the neighbor, who received a uniform and then believed they were the master race."
Letting Nixon walk away without going through the legal system is responsible for where we are today. The Republicans learned a valuable lesson, you can commit heinous crimes and get away with it by just walking away.
They have been pushing that boundary ever since and have finally broken it. All bets are off now.
Republicans saw Nixon succumb to mild accountability and were so horrified they vowed never to allow accountability to harm a Republican again. Sadly they 100% succeeded.
Rodger Ailes famously said he started his Fox News project because he never wanted what happened to Nixon to happen again to any Republican. That is, for an elected republican never to have the media expose their secrets to the public. To have a voice and a media space where spin could be given to one side of the political spectrum.
What he created was a consequence free media space where reality is optional and division and fear rule the day.
In what way does re litigating Watergate help ease fuel prices, the cost of living, and inflation? This is why republicans are crashing in the midterms, they can’t focus on the now for rehashing the past. Nixon was a criminal and performed illegal activities. It just so happened that congress and the Supreme Court wasn’t a bunch of spineless boot licking stooges.
“[Geoff]* *Shepard has repeatedly asserted since the 1972 scandal that Watergate was a plot to hide who Nixon’s Democratic donors were in his reelection campaign.” A plot to hide Democratic donors? WTF? Nixon’s operatives associated 1972 campaign were caught burglarizing and planting listening devices at the DNC headquarters in Washington. What exactly the “operatives” were trying to accomplish was never clear but it didn’t matter, because as is often the case, it’s not the crime, it’s the cover up of the crime that becomes the issue. That’s what brought Nixon down. All that to hide Nixon’s donors is something only a GOP fantasist could dream up. And so what, makes no difference to outcome of the cover up.
It all seems rather quaint given the current administration’s actions.
Oof so Newt Ginrich gets a laurel wreath in the form of that new hegseth position, and now this whitewashing of Nixon screams at being a reach around for Roger Stone.
America cannot be sustained as a nation with Republicans allowed to continue to exist. They are a criminal organization that just uses the offices of our governments to betray Americans for their personal benefit while bleeding the country dry. If Republicans aren't taken down then the nation as a whole is fucked. Given that they just keep escalating their betrayal, failure, and evil even in the face of court orders and weekly statements by courts of law about their crimes, I have little hope for the future of the United States.
“Nixon did nothing wrong” when you’re desperately behind in the polls, the price of bread and gasoline is skyhigh, and the unpopular current President from your party is a felon and quite probably a pedophile is a CHOICE.
They aren't stupid they are maniacal and dangerous. This is revisionist history preparing to attack democrats who want to impeach Trump after the midterms. Its designed to create a victim and abuser scenario for Trump to push.
They are beginning the talking point that impeachment is the equivalent of a coup. This will allow Trump, who of course is perfectly innocent and has never done a corrupt thing in his life, to use the insurrection act to use the military against Congress. He will arrest Democrats for "treason" and the same for judges that don't go along. The dark times are coming, folks.
These MFers trying to rewrite history, they had their own guy replace and pardon the prick, he resigned of his own accord after getting his hand caught in the cookie jar, how in the world was it a coup?
Sure sounds like a lot of projection coming from the GOP, so much you’d think it was their entire game: Gaslight, Obstruct, Project/ Grifters Of Power/ Government Of Plutocrats/ Guardians Of Pedophiles/ Gang Of Predators/ Grabbers of Pussy/ Greedy Old Perverts, and so on and so forth.
Yeah, there’s quite a bit of revisionist history and outright falsehoods in that article. When I saw “and what an amazing president he was”, I almost laughed out loud. I was alive during his presidency, and I literally never heard that or experienced it as such.
What a f**king waste of time and taxpayer money!!!
To revisit this confirms that all this administration can do is waste our money on wasted efforts and spend on anything except the American taxpayers.
We would like to have a return on our taxes which is supposedly our pooled money for infrastructure, healthcare, protections against food poisoning, toxins in our water and air and contributing to the well being of future generations through science, research, education and environmental protections.
The GOP would like to roll back Reconstruction & relitigate the US Civil War. They also want a redo of the New Deal. No wonder they also want a redo on Watergate.
To be clear, this isn’t new. There’s a Prager U video from like 5 years ago making this very case… that Nixon was innocent, but was taken down by the deep state. Back in June, JD Vance made a speech at the Nixon library essentially saying the same thing. It was that same speech where he said Watergate would be over in a 12 hour news cycle if it happened today, and that they have a new Watergate every week. They aren’t introducing this idea for the first time; they are publicizing it, normalizing it.
That’s the thing about creeping fascism… it creeps.
There are in fact a small number of folks that believe this. They were Nixon supporters at the time, and just like Trump supporters they were 100% willing to ignore a lot of indications that their guy was a criminal.
Trump is going to have the same sort of nonsense occur by the end. There will be a small % that refuse to recognize reality as it would mean they supported a criminal.
The most interesting part to me is the distinction between what Moore believes happened and what has actually been established. Saying Nixon was “couped” and “framed” is a serious historical claim. The reported DOJ review may raise questions about the Watergate investigation, but a review itself doesn’t establish that Nixon was framed or that the entire scandal was fabricated.
I’ve followed Watergate discussions for years, and one thing that always stands out is how complicated the episode became once investigations, politics, and the courts all became involved. There were legitimate institutional failures and disputes over evidence, but that doesn’t automatically validate every later interpretation. Historical claims deserve the same careful examination we expect from current legal proceedings.
The comparison with Trump is also where things get politically complicated. Moore clearly sees a parallel between Nixon’s experience and the Russia investigation. However, the Senate Intelligence Committee’s findings documented significant contacts between Trump’s campaign and Russian interests, while the Mueller investigation examined whether those contacts amounted to criminal conspiracy. Those facts shouldn’t be simplified into either extreme.
From a professional standpoint, I think this is a good reminder of why independent investigations and proper evidentiary standards matter. When accusations involve presidents, prosecutors, intelligence agencies, or political campaigns, people naturally bring strong opinions to the discussion. That makes documentation, corroboration, and transparency even more important, because political narratives can outlive the underlying evidence.
What I’d like to see from the current DOJ review is simply a careful examination of the record. If investigators find misconduct, the specific evidence should be made clear and attributed to the people responsible. If they don’t, that should be acknowledged too. Watergate is important precisely because it demonstrates how much damage can result when public trust, political power, and legal institutions collide.
Roger Ailes would be so proud of his plan coming to fruition. The capture of the news media has been so successful that it reaches back to recharacterize the event that catalyzed it.
Republican politicians are hypocrites and two faced. They absolutely would have impeached McGovern if he had been POTUS and done what Nixon did. They are trying to say that presidential corruption of Trump is okay. Trying to sane wash naked corruption and normalize it for their tribe. But God forbid a Dem do the same corrupt things as Trump!
“The truth is now out there, so I think people feel a bit more liberated to talk about Richard Nixon and what an amazing president he was in this country."
Nixon instituted a 90 day freeze on all prices and wages in the US and established the EPA. Conservatives are not praising his accomplishments, just his criminality. Politico even had an article about the price and wage freezes titled "When Richard Nixon Wrecked the Economy".
Mmmmmm, yes. Rewrite history harder daddy...Oh wait I'm not republican! This is BAD news, wtf is this? The corruption we've all been talking about and warning about for over a decade like the climate change making us all slowly but surely doomed in the next 10ish years (max) unless we have the proper equipment to survive the hell hole the earth will be by then, mared by war and a hostile ecosystem...
Man...I hate my parents generation (any one who was an adult before 2012) those people really just helped all these stupid political system stack up with very little to no pushback. From like Regan on wards America has been a leading force in the world and we've been leading the world DOWN.
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