Rewriting Watergate
Why it’s happening, and why it just might work
“If Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be a 12-hour news story. Like, the idea that it would have taken down a presidency is crazy.” – JD Vance
To begin, let’s be honest about that Vance quote, because he is absolutely correct. But the fact he’s correct isn’t what makes the quote important. The important part is why he’s correct.
To fully understand what he’s doing, we have to understand how propaganda works, and how propagandists do what they do, because there is a method to this madness, and it has worked many times in the past.
First, it’s important to understand that while criminals like Trump and Vance will sometimes deny their criminality, they often decide to justify it instead. This is especially common when the evidence is particularly strong. If the initial denial doesn’t stand up to public scrutiny, they no longer deny the act itself, choosing instead to deny that the act is in fact a crime. And if that doesn’t work – if the public still believes that the crime occurred, and that is in fact a crime – that’s when we get the final justification, which is exactly what JD Vance is offering by trying to rewrite the history of a disgraced president from our past.
Pure propagandists rarely deny their actions. They instead tell us not to care about those actions, because they are so common that “everyone is doing it.” And if everyone is doing it, it can’t be a crime.
That’s what’s happening here. JD Vance is not defending the Trump Administration’s rampant criminality, because it would be ludicrous of him to try. So instead, JD is actually using GOP criminality and corruption as a shield. Because criminality is everywhere, and because it has penetrated every American institution at levels never before seen, JD Vance, the Vice-President of The United States, is telling us to stop caring about it. He’s telling us that government corruption is America’s new normal, and we the peasants should shut up, lie back, and just let it all happen.
This is just another chapter in the ever-evolving criminal enterprise that is the modern GOP, and it isn’t going to stop until we stop it. And that might very well mean acting outside of the law ourselves in one way or another. Now, by that, I do not advocate for any kind of violence, but now that the administration is above the law, the next step is to imprison the rest of us under it. Dissent is being criminalized more and more each day, voting rights are under a nationwide assault, and the law is now nothing more than a political tool. Even the Supreme Court is no longer legitimate. Honestly, the Orwell references practically write themselves.
However, the fact that this particular argument is being made at this particular time is cause for hope. After all, we all know neither Trump nor Vance gives a tinker’s damn about Richard Nixon. Nixon is just a tool himself, a totem, if you will. By invoking his name and trying to rehabilitate his image, Trump and Vance hope to diminish the public perception of their own criminality. As CNN’s Aaron Blake puts it:
[T]he real point of Vance’s comments […] wasn’t to make Nixon seem good; it was to make Trump seem not so bad.
Accountability is coming, and they know it. By trying to convince us that crimes are no longer crimes, they hope to avoid the accelerating righteous wrath of the American people.
Good luck with that, I guess.
Brett Pransky is a writer, a teacher, a father, and a husband, but rarely in that order. He spends his days amplifying the voices of freedom and democracy as an Editor right here at The Political Voices Network, and he spends his nights trying to fix the world one clever sentence at a time.