Vance says Watergate would be a 12-hour news story today

JD Vance used a stop at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in Yorba Linda, California, to recast Watergate as a media skirmish rather than a constitutional rupture. Speaking Thursday, June 25, while promoting his memoir, Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, the vice president said the scandal that drove Richard Nixon from office would be “like a 12-hour news story” if it happened today.

The library was closed to visitors for the event, which was billed as a candid conversation with Vance about the issues shaping America’s future. After discussing his book and his faith journey, Vance shifted to Nixon and said the former president’s legacy was “enjoying a bit of a renaissance.” He added, “I’ve always liked Richard Nixon,” and argued that the same kinds of institutional forces targeted both Nixon and Donald Trump.

Vance went further, describing Watergate as “a story of how the deep state took down” Nixon. He said, “The idea that it would have taken down a presidency is crazy.” The comments landed in a setting built around one of the most scrutinized episodes in presidential history, and they put Vance, who is widely expected to be a 2028 presidential contender, squarely inside a debate over whether Watergate should be remembered as a warning about abuse of power or minimized as a partisan artifact of another era.

The historical record cuts against any easy flattening of the scandal. Watergate began with the June 17, 1972 break-in at Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C. Nixon had just won reelection in a landslide, but the scandal unfolded over roughly two years and escalated into a clash involving the presidency, the media, Congress, executive agencies and the Supreme Court.

Nixon resigned on August 9, 1974, under threat of impeachment, and remains the only U.S. president to have resigned. Gerald Ford then took office, and Watergate became a defining example of presidential abuse of power, one that reshaped expectations about accountability long after the tapes, hearings and investigations faded from daily headlines. Vance’s remarks asked listeners to see that history through a far less severe lens.