Richard Nixon in Paoli, Pennsylvania in the Philadelphia suburbs/Main Line during a presidential campaign event in July 1968 (White House photographer Ollie Atkins/Wikimedia Commons)
President Donald Trump — twice impeached but protected by his safe Republican Senate majority — is now campaigning to exonerate self-admitted criminal and former president Richard Nixon.
“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,” argued Vice President JD Vance in a recent appearance at the Nixon Library.
But this news provoked puzzled looks from presidential historian Jeffrey Engel, who told the cast of Thursday’s CNN News Live that Nixon himself admitted to committing criminal acts.
“It would be laughable if it weren't so dangerous, this idea that Nixon was ‘taken down,’ that Nixon was not guilty. And the reason that this is so important today is that, of course, we are living in the aftermath of the 2024 decision by the Supreme Court that gave presidents basically full immunity for anything they do in office,” said Engel, coauthor of Impeachment and American History. “… It essentially gives those critics of Donald Trump more historical ammunition to say that the presidency is in itself a unilateral body and should not be checked by any other branch of government.”
Trump has reportedly asked former Nixon aides why Nixon resigned rather than fight it out, but Engel said that speaks more to Trump’s philosophy of never admitting defeat and never stop fighting, not right and wrong.
“Richard Nixon ultimately, we have to remember, didn't resign in 1974 because he wanted to. He resigned because it became very clear because of pressure from other Republicans, including in the Senate, all time colleagues of his, that he was going to be impeached. And if he was going to be impeached, he was likely going to be convicted as well,” said Engel.
Concerning Watergate, Engel reminded CNN anchors that the last stab in the heart of Nixon’s presidency came from within his own party, at a moment back “when Republicans stood up for country over party.”
“It's laughable, but it's also really, really very interesting because historians have debated for the last several decades, not whether Nixon was guilty,” said Engel. “Everyone concedes that Nixon was guilty. Nixon basically admitted he was guilty and was found saying illegal things on tape. The real debate for historians has always been about president Ford's decision to pardon Richard Nixon.”
And Nixon was irredeemably guilty, added Engel -- no matter how hard Trump wants to “rewrite history.”
“[He] would have to ignore all of the audiotapes that Nixon kept of his time in the White House, which I think clearly demonstrates his culpability,” said Engel. “The fact that he knew about Watergate, the fact he knew about the break in at Watergate. … [T]he fact that Nixon knew about it at the time, the fact that he tried hard at the time to make sure that the people who had supported him would get off scott free, the fact that he tried to cover up the crime, and then ultimately, the fact that he fired different prosecutors in order to impede the investigation. All of those things are way too large to ignore for anyone who really takes a serious look at what Nixon did.”
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