Snapshot · The Bulwark Podcast
Vice President JD Vance told the Nixon Foundation that if Watergate happened today it would be a 12-hour news cycle, not enough to bring down a presidency.
Where this was said
At 34:36 · chapter starts 33:50
The conversation shifts to what Tim Miller calls a 'planned bit': JD Vance at the Nixon Foundation, delivering a pre-meditated rehabilitation of Watergate. Vance's argument, played in audio, is that the scandal would barely register today and that the 'deep state' that destroyed Nixon was the same one that tried to destroy Trump. [1] — Tim Miller "JD Vance told the Nixon Foundation that if Watergate happened today it would be a 12-hour news story, not a presidency-ending scandal. He c…" 34:36 Tim Miller offers a crisp corrective: Nixon's own aides ordered the DNC break-in, Nixon used the CIA to construct a cover-up, a White House slush fund financed the operation, and the president himself was on tape. There was no deep state conspiracy — the deep state was Nixon's. Jane Coaston notes that Vance may simply not know what happened, and that the right's Nixon rehabilitation requires carefully ignoring the EPA, his Black advisory cabinet, and his Ebony magazine interview. The hosts ultimately land on a more chilling reading of Vance's remarks: he isn't making a historical argument. He's announcing that in the Trump era, the government can commit crimes in the open, because the propaganda apparatus and the degraded attention economy will absorb anything.
JD Vance told the Nixon Foundation that if Watergate happened today it would be a 12-hour news story, not a presidency-ending scandal. He compared the 'deep state' that brought down Nixon to forces opposing Trump — getting the story exactly backwards.
Nixon's aides bugged the DNC, used the CIA to cover it up, funded the whole operation with a White House slush fund, and Nixon was caught on his own tapes. The 'deep state' was Nixon's own apparatus — not the investigators. JD Vance got this exactly wrong.
JD Vance's Catholic conversion narrative credits Peter Thiel as a divinely sent emissary who showed him that smart people could be religious.
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France built 56 nuclear plants in the 1970s and now has the cheapest energy in Europe, making it independent of Russian or Middle Eastern energy geopolitics.
Estonia has a single tax form, a law preventing the government from asking citizens for the same information twice, and a flat rate of tax — enabling competitive taxation.
Portugal's Lisbon, once a city with a major heroin problem, legalised drugs and redirected enforcement spending into rehabilitation and housing, dramatically reducing crime.
The first Boland Amendment banning CIA and Defense Department funds for the Contras passed the House unanimously — yet the Reagan administration ignored it.
Over just two years, Saudi Arabia alone donated $32 million to the Contra rebels, giving loosely affiliated factions millions they had no way to spend on arms.
The National Endowment for the Preservation of Liberty raised $6.3 million for the Contras but only $3.3 million reached them — a shockingly low 52% program expense rate.
Richard Secord and Albert Hakim marked up their arms shipments to the Contras by as much as 300%, making enormous personal profits from the covert operation.
Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, tapped to run the entire covert Contra support operation, had no prior experience in covert operations whatsoever — he was learning as he went.
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