After nearly two years of weaponizing the DOJ, featuring official investigations and/or terminations of every career officer who was assigned to investigate Trump’s crimes against the United States, Trump’s DOJ has begun rehabilitating the reputation of former President Richard Nixon.
Even though Nixon was caught engaging in a botched break-in at the Democratic National Committee, illegal wiretapping, and pocketing illegal campaign contributions, more than half a century later, Trump defenders are considering a new spin on the whole scandal: Nixon was the victim of lawfare. Just like Trump.
The only reason Republicans would recast Nixon as a victim is to soften perceptions of Trump’s rampant criminality, set to bite him in the a– after the midterms. Republican Rep. Riley Moore of West Virginia says Nixon was “framed,” and wants to name an aircraft carrier after him, claiming that people are only now free to talk about “what an amazing president he was.”
Given the well-settled, recorded evidence of Nixon’s crimes, this kind of revisionism sounds like a confession that Trump is more corrupt than Nixon ever was.
JD Vance is all in on the effort. In June, Vance announced at the Richard Nixon library that, “If you look at the story of how the deep state took down Richard Nixon, it’s not all that different from what the same groups of people — the same institutions — tried to do to Donald Trump in the first Trump administration.”
Vance added, “If Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be a 12-hour news story. The idea that it would have taken down a presidency is crazy.”
Vance’s nod to quick news cycles and craziness doesn’t defend Nixon so much as indict Trump’s manipulative flood-the-zone strategy: overload the media with so much chaos and corruption the public tunes it out.
Trump can’t understand why Nixon’s crimes defeated him
Another big fan of historic revisionism concurs: Trump. Trump has asked on several occasions why Nixon resigned the presidency instead of continuing to drive the Constitutional crisis he created. It tracks. Trump attempted a violent coup even after he lost an election, and will remain a victim who refuses to admit his crimes until the day he dies.
That a fluctuating cohort of Americans continues to swallow those lies is an indictment of our underfunded educational system and right-wing media, and little else.
Trump has a baked-in incentive to defend Nixon as he rolls back many DOJ overhauls that grew directly from Nixon’s crimes, including limits on presidential authority. Trump has fired inspectors general who were set to impose government accountability, and has asserted the right to fire over two million career civil servants who don’t show him political loyalty.
Trump knows he is a criminal; he knows that unless he declares martial law, orchestrates an invasion on American soil, or refuses to honor the midterms, legal accountability will soon circumvent presidential immunity: corruption is not an official act, even under the Roberts court. He’s 80, not 105, there’s plenty of time left for him to rot in prison for various crimes, including selling national security and secret AI chip technology to the United Arab Emirates for a $550 million investment in his sons’ World Liberty Financial; accepting $635 million in royalties from a licensing agreement tied to the $TRUMP coin; Barron Trump earning $40 million while still in college; Donald Jr. and Eric securing more than $6 billion in U.S. government and Pentagon contracts; and earning over $1.2 billion from crypto ventures in 2025, all personal enrichments and illegal emoluments.
The harm goes far deeper than Trump family pockets, because federal agencies established to serve the American public are now serving Trump’s oligarchs. As Thom Hartmann writes, regulatory agencies set up to protect clean air, water and soil are now run by industry insiders policing themselves; insider trading is rampant within the administration; the Department of Defense is writing multi-billion dollar checks to Trump’s political donors; Trump openly pardons people who have paid him millions of dollars; Internal Revenue Service staff have been re-assigned from auditing the wealthy to auditing working-class people; public institutions have been turned into private, for-profit entities run by Trump’s GOP donors; and environmental and labor rules have been rewritten to serve polluting industries, to say nothing of Trump’s overt attempts to bribe voters with his $5000 offer and his $500 check-to-voters stunt from last week.
Hiding mistakes is a sign of weakness
Nixon, like Trump, made a lot of mistakes. Mistakes don’t define us. But how we respond to them does. The Roman philosopher Marcus Tullius Cicero wrote that, “Any man can make mistakes, but only an idiot persists in his error.” Character is not defined by the stumble, but by rational response, humility, and willingness to correct course. Confucianism teaches the same thing: “A man who has committed a mistake and doesn’t correct it is committing another mistake.” To err is part of human growth; it only becomes a defining character flaw when we refuse to acknowledge or fix it.
Trump’s many mistakes wouldn’t have to define Trump either, if only he had the character to learn and admit error. Someone who deflects blame or buries his errors by trying to silence the media learns nothing and will take the country down with him rather than fall alone.
Historian Ruth Ben Ghiat has spent a lifetime studying strongmen throughout history. She writes that strongmen live in fear of being exposed. Strongmen “have a constant need to feed their ego because they are weak and fragile people,” she writes, “this is why they build their bunkers. And Trump’s always talking about, you know, not only the ballroom where people can adulate him and he can get money, but the bunker underneath; that’s his safe space.”
History has spoken on Nixon, and will speak similarly on Trump. The condemning difference between then and now is that when Nixon’s crimes came out, support in his own party collapsed overnight. Republican leaders of Congress went to the White House and told Nixon the votes to stop impeachment and conviction were gone, and Nixon resigned two days later. Trump’s Republicans refuse to stop Trump’s corruption, so they’re doing the next best thing: spinning it as victimhood.
Sabrina Haake is a political analyst and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.