The conservative theory fueling Trump’s push to rehabilitate Nixon’s image

President Donald Trump signs an executive order in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, D.C., March 7, 2025. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein

President Donald Trump and his administration are newly committed to exonerating Richard Nixon, but according to one prominent New York Times columnist, the real reason behind this push is, like many things with Trump, entirely self-serving.

Reports emerged last week the Department of Justice was pushing forward with an investigation into whether the Watergate investigation that toppled Nixon's presidency was the result of prosecutorial "misconduct." The scandal, which began with Nixon directing operatives to spy on the DNC headquarters in the Watergate Hotel, spiraled into a years-long quagmire and ultimately led to his resignation from the presidency before impeachment proceedings could get underway.

In his latest "Takes" video shared to YouTube, Times columnist Jamelle Bouie noted that it should go without saying that the Watergate scandal "was a series of quite serious crimes," and not a "coup" perpetrated by the "deep state" against Nixon, as some in Trump's orbit have suggested.

Despite that, Bouie also conceded that he was "not actually that surprised" to see the Trump administration going down this avenue, and argued that their goals tie into Trump's current predicament with his plummeting approval ratings.

"Trump is reaching Nixon levels of approval," Bouie explained. "He's not quite there yet. Nixon, I believe, bottomed out at around 25 percent approval. But he's heading there. His average approval is in the low 30s, and we're getting polls that are in the high 20s at this point. Very low 30s, high 20s. Trump is not that far away from Nixon-level approval, and it wouldn't take much. Another price shock would do it."

He continued: "If Republicans do suffer a big loss in November, then there'll be plenty of voters who ultimately decide that they just don't want anything else to do with the guy, and they'll register their disapproval. It doesn't mean that they are no longer Republicans, that they wouldn't vote for a Republican candidate, but it does mean that they may be disengaged from both politics and the party. And so, as the president approaches Nixon levels of unpopularity, it checks out that both the administration and its allies would be trying to say, 'Well, no, actually Nixon was the victim of a horrific deep state conspiracy.'"

Bouie also argued that the entire conservative political project of the last several decades has been trying to prevent anything like the Watergate scandal from happening to a Republican president ever again, to oppose "the idea that a president or a Republican president would ever be held accountable for that abuse of power." This has led to the movement's longtime fixation on the "unitary executive theory,"' which Bouie described as "a political and intellectual framework for allowing a president to act unilaterally, anarchical, even [with] dictatorial authority."

"You can really think of so much of the modern conservative movement as being an attempt to get revenge for and vindicate Richard Nixon," Bouie said. "And so that's the other reason why none of this is surprising. Of course, Trump, who embodies the unitary executive, who is relying on these theories, who is trying to actualize them and bring about a presidency that is even more unaccountable and lawless than Nixon's, of course, the Trump administration and its allies would be looking for ways to rehabilitate Nixon."

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