Generation Z and younger millennials are making former President Richard Nixon great again. A subculture of the social media landscape is engaged in “Nixon-maxxing,” a plethora of individuals on a crusade to clean up his image, which had been dismantled by Watergate and the catalog of White House tapes over the last 50 years. An organic Nixon Renaissance has emerged in the United States.
Do You Have Your Richard Nixon Merch?
Last month, at a Nixon Presidential Library event in Yorba Linda, California, Vice President JD Vance declared that the Republican leader’s legacy is being revived.
“I think Nixon’s historical legacy is enjoying a bit of a renaissance, and deservedly so,” Vance said. “I joked that if Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be like a 12-hour news story. The idea that it took down a presidency is crazy.”
Eminent funnyman Bill Murray appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience last year, explaining that he could no longer trust famed Watergate reporter Bob Woodward after his book about John Belushi was “completely inaccurate.” He quipped to the podcaster about the 1986 book Wired: The Short Life and Fast Times of John Belushi: “I read like five pages of ‘Wired,’ and I went, ‘Oh my God. They framed Nixon.’” Murray continued:
“If this is what he writes about my friend that I’ve known, you know, for half of my adult life, which is completely inaccurate, talking to like, the people of the outer, outer circle, getting the story – what the hell did that could they have done to Nixon? I just felt like if he did this to my friend like this, and I acknowledge I only read five pages, but the five pages I read made me want to set fire to the whole thing.”
In an August 2025 segment on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, conservative commentator Christopher Rufo promised that LBJ’s successor would be vindicated by 2035, arguing that Watergate “was a setup from start to finish.”
The Richard Nixon Foundation has been flooding X and other social media platforms with compelling interviews and short-form clips featuring the 37th president. These videos include everything from his foreign policy views to the meaning of life, offering in-depth insights that are quite rare from neoteric political figures.
PragerU, conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt, and even The Daily Wire's Michael Knowles have gotten hooked on Nixon-maxxing.
Trumpian Takes
It could be said that Richard Nixon was the Donald Trump of his time, minus the several billion dollars in net worth: a pugnacious president, despised by the media and beset by probes, brought down by the very establishment his backers insist is now targeting the 47th president.
Nixon touted himself as a president for Middle America, lambasting the coastal elites. Like Trump, privileged liberals could never fathom anyone possessing different views. The New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael is often cited for famously saying after Nixon's landslide reelection in 1972, “How can he have won? Nobody I know voted for him.”
In the 1962 California gubernatorial election, Nixon was thought to be left for dead following his "you won't have Nixon to kick around anymore" declaration. After the 2020 presidential election, many thought the MAGA movement was finished. Both men commenced successful comebacks.
Trump and Nixon share a similar record as well.
In 1968, Nixon promised a plan to end the war in Vietnam, but the conflict lasted a few more years. Trump committed to no more foreign wars and then engaged in a regime change operation in Venezuela and launched a quagmire in the Middle East.
In his second term, Nixon initiated the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), launched the Nixon shock of price and wage controls, and proposed a guaranteed basic income for working families. By comparison, Trump has purchased equity stakes in US companies, imposed sweeping tariffs, and introduced Trump Accounts for newborns.
Pundits may dismiss renewed scrutiny of Watergate as mere revisionism, scoffing at any challenge to the story history has canonized. But just as skepticism toward the official narrative of the deep state’s campaign against Trump since 2016 persists, questioning the orthodox account of Watergate is hardly unwarranted.
Who’s Next?
What president – dead or alive – will next receive praise? Since the news that Iraq signed $60 billion worth of energy deals with US companies, there have been murmurs across the Xverse that former President George W. Bush has been vindicated and deserves accolades for his efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Is he next on the list? Perhaps it is too soon – give it another 25 years.
It just goes to show what a few memes and bite-sized videos can do. It also reaffirms what Richard Milhous Nixon wrote in a note to himself in 1969: “Defeat doesn’t finish a man, quitting does. A man is not finished when he’s defeated. He's finished when he quits.”
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