Vice President JD Vance said Thursday the Watergate scandal that forced President Richard Nixon from office would have faded as a brief media cycle in today’s environment, comparing the institutions he says brought down Nixon to those he believes targeted President Trump.
“The idea that it would have taken down a presidency is crazy,” Vance said during a conversation with the Richard Nixon Foundation at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in Yorba Linda, California.
Nixon resigned in August 1974 after Washington Post reporting and congressional investigators documented his administration’s involvement in a surveillance operation targeting Democratic rivals during the 1972 presidential election. The subsequent coverup proved as damaging as the original break-in.
Vance, who said he “always liked” Nixon, drew a direct line between the former president’s fall and what he described as institutional efforts to undermine Trump.
“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 administration,” Vance said.
Trump was impeached twice during his first term and acquitted by the Senate both times. The first impeachment stemmed from allegations of a pressure campaign involving Ukraine. The second followed the January 6, 2021, Capitol breach, in which Trump was accused of inciting an insurrection. Nixon, by contrast, resigned under the direct threat of impeachment rather than face the Senate.
The vice president also drew a personal parallel to the 37th president.
“Young senator, vice president, writes some bestselling books, is hated by the media,” Vance said. “Kind of sounds like JD Vance.”
He called Nixon’s historical reputation something that is “enjoying a bit of a renaissance” and framed both men as figures targeted by entrenched government and media interests.
Vance was at the Nixon Library to promote his new book, “Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith,” which traces his path from a Protestant upbringing in Appalachian Ohio to his conversion to Catholicism in the summer of 2019. He has spoken frequently about faith as a steadying force in his political career.
The Nixon Foundation event was recorded and posted to YouTube.
Vance is widely viewed as a front-runner for the 2028 Republican presidential nomination. A recent poll placed him neck-and-neck with Secretary of State Marco Rubio in a hypothetical GOP primary. Trump told guests at a White House event in May that the two would make a “good ticket,” though no formal endorsement has been made.
The comments mark one of the more direct comparisons Vance has drawn between the two administrations and the institutions both men say worked to undermine them. His remarks at a presidential library dedicated to a figure whose downfall centered on abuses of power drew immediate attention, with critics noting the historical parallel cuts in multiple directions.
