“Nixonmaxxing” – Did Trump Revive 37th President’s Legacy?

In one of the most curious political developments of the last several years, President Richard Nixon is making one more comeback – and young conservatives, many of whom weren’t even born when he died, are leading the charge.

If you’ve spent any time perusing social media recently, you’ve likely seen slickly edited short-form videos “hyping up” Nixon’s speeches and depicting the 37th President as a cult hero.

In one, Nixon declares, “America is great because her people are great,” while Guns N Roses’ “Sweet Child o’ Mine” swells in the background. Another montage of Nixon campaign footage is set to “The Largest,” a 2024 track from rapper “BigXthaPlug” – something that the famously stiff Nixon hardly could’ve imagined.

Those examples are hardly isolated. Across Instagram, YouTube, and X, Gen-Z conservative content creators are setting Nixon speeches to rap and rock songs. Many of the videos were produced by the Richard Nixon Foundation and have racked up more than 250 million views. More than half of the audience is under 35, while attendance at the Nixon Library in Yorba Linda, California is reportedly up 30 percent. And when the Nixon Foundation printed hats stamped “Nixonmaxxing,” as the internet has dubbed the trend, they sold out within hours.

Some of the appeal is ironic. Clips of Nixon spliced with 21st century rapper Drake should not work together, which is why viewers can’t stop watching the odd pairing. But the entertainment value of the videos is only an invitation to listen to Nixon’s words.

Nixon waxes wise about America, its responsibilities in an increasingly dangerous world, the perils of communism, media lies, and how one should navigate the ups and downs of life. The viewer is left startled by Nixon’s prescience and the nagging suspicion that he was far more than the cartoonish “crook” young people read about in their history textbooks.

The revisiting of Nixon’s legacy by a new generation appears to be more profound than a passing counter-cultural fad.

For half a century, the national media and Washington’s permanent bureaucracy held a near-monopoly over Nixon’s story. Watergate made them heroes, so Nixon had to remain the villain. Every political scandal since has been stamped with a “gate” suffix in tribute – most famously the “Russiagate” saga.

The simpler the narrative stayed, the more securely it placed the press and the unelected federal machinery at the center of their own moral universe. Their verdict became the mythos of their institution, and they have danced on Nixon’s political grave ever since.

Then Donald Trump fought those same institutions and exposed them as the same crooks that had it in for Nixon five decades ago.

Just as Gen-Z was coming of age, they witnessed first-hand what corrupt bureaucrats and dishonest media were willing to do the American people’s duly elected president. The FBI opened a secret investigation into the Trump 2016 campaign built largely on opposition research funded by his political rivals. Anonymous government bureaucrats leaked selectively to friendly reporters, who collected prizes for printing the leaks. Fifty-one former intelligence officials signed a letter before the 2020 election dismissing the Hunter Biden laptop scandal, a true story, as Russian disinformation. There were also two impeachments, an FBI raid on the former and future president’s home, and a stack of indictments timed to the campaign calendar.

To his everlasting credit, Trump fought back and showed a younger generation that Washington’s self-appointed referees are, and always have been, political players attempting to wield power for themselves. Later, the Justice Department inspector general found 17 significant inaccuracies and omissions in the FBI’s surveillance applications. And an FBI lawyer pleaded guilty to altering an email used in the process.

Having seen how the permanent bureaucracy and national media are treating Trump, Gen-Z is rightly suspicious that the first man this establishment class buried may have been treated unfairly.

Nixon’s life of humble beginnings to becoming one of the most popular presidents of his time is the epitome of the American Dream.

One Gen Z viral video captures Nixon’s everyman appeal through a soliloquy delivered by the TV character Don Draper of Mad Men, played by Jon Hamm.

“Nixon is from nothing; a self-made man. The Abe Lincoln of California, who was vice president of the United States six years after getting out of the Navy,” Draper says. “[President] Kennedy? I see a silver spoon. Nixon? I see myself.” Drake’s song, “National Treasures” then crashes over a highlight montage of Nixon’s political career. The clip has hit over two million views.

Other videos chronicle Nixon’s resilience in the face of devastating defeats. Like a modern-day Seneca, Nixon stoically counsels, “The greatness comes not when things go always good for you, but the greatness comes when you are really tested. When you take some knocks, some disappointments, when sadness comes. Because only if you’ve been in the deepest valley can you ever know how magnificent it is to be on the highest mountain.”

Nixon spoke from experience. He lost one of the closest presidential elections in history to his archrival John Kennedy in 1960. Two years later, he lost the gubernatorial election in his home state of California. The media couldn’t hold back their jubilation at his repeated defeats. “Barring a miracle,” Time Magazine declared, “Richard Nixon’s political career is over.”

And yet, Nixon won the 1968 presidential election as a triumphant outcast.

He spoke for Americans exhausted by riots, assassinations, war, and economic upheaval. He wasn’t an East Coast liberal or a Western archconservative. His coalition was the “silent majority” of working families across the political divide who obeyed the law and resented the cultural elites who treated them as backward.

The social media videos today may draw young viewers to Nixon, but his seriousness keeps them watching. One clip shows Nixon refusing to change who he is merely to look better on TV.

“I am not an actor, I am just going to be myself,” he says. “If there is anything I do have to offer to the American people, it’s the fact that I believe deeply in what I say and that I am myself.” This authenticity and resolve made him one of the more successful and popular presidents of his era.

In the White House, Nixon withdrew troops from Vietnam and ended the draft. His opening to China redrew the Cold War map. He negotiated the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, easing nuclear tensions. His administration also oversaw the peaceful desegregation of Southern schools, and he signed Title IX into law.

Although the national media was hostile to him throughout his first term, voters rewarded him with a staggering mandate for a second. In 1972, Nixon won 49 states, 520 electoral votes, and more than 60 percent of the popular vote in one of the largest landslide victories in American history.

But 21 months later, the media monopoly and federal bureaucracy conspired to sink Nixon with Watergate.

Vice President JD Vance put that contrast bluntly during a June visit to the Nixon Library. “If Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be like a 12-hour news story,” he said. “The idea that it would have taken down a presidency is crazy.”

Vance then compared Nixon’s downfall to what the deep state later tried to do to Trump. “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 in the first Trump administration.”

Vance’s comparison gives words to the suspicion behind many of Gen Z’s viral clips.

Men connected to Nixon’s reelection committee burglarized the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate office complex. Nixon did not order the break-in, but the so-called “smoking gun” White House tapes recorded his effort to contain the investigation by asking the CIA to tell the FBI that its inquiry threatened a national security operation.

Once the tape was made public, media pressure became overwhelming and Nixon’s support in Congress collapsed. But evidence revealed in the decades since shows that Nixon’s indiscretion did not make every government official honest or every newspaper legend true.

Ben Bradlee, the Washington Post editor who ran the Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein stories, later expressed doubts about one or more of the details. “There’s a residual fear in my soul that that isn’t quite straight,” he admitted in a 1990 interview later uncovered by his biographer. Bradlee also noticed his reporters’ “great habit was to come around about 7:30 at night to say they had a hulluva story.” He said they did so on purpose, “because they thought the guard would be down and they could slip it into the paper without the usual sort of grilling.”

And then there is “Deep Throat” himself.

In a 2005 Vanity Fair interview, Mark Felt admitted that he was the anonymous high-level government leaker. He was the FBI’s second-ranking official at the time of Watergate, a man with access to the bureau’s files whom Nixon had passed over to lead the agency just years prior.

Historian Max Holland concluded that Felt leaked partly to undermine acting FBI Director L. Patrick Gray and to sink the president who refused to promote him. Felt may have told reporters what he believed to be true, but he was still an unelected official settling a score with a president for personal reasons. That is not how the new coverage or how the later award-winning film tells the story.

The truth about Watergate makes the heroic image of journalists and career bureaucrats considerably less pure.

The media let their hatred of Nixon turn his mistake into a feeding frenzy, passing judgement before uncovering the full truth or allowing Congress to consider a punishment proportionate to the offense.

Ultimately, Nixon fought the media on a battlefield the media owned. Fifty years later, Trump entered the same fight after the internet had blown open the gates, ending the old press corps’ monopoly over what Americans could see, hear, and believe. A hostile headline may still wound a politician, but it can no longer hold a presidency captive.

The Gen Z videos show an elite political and media class that never forgave Nixon for helping expose Alger Hiss as a Soviet agent, then seized upon Watergate to finish the job. From that perspective, Nixon’s downfall looks less like a triumph of democratic accountability than what British historian Paul Johnson called a “media putsch” against the overwhelming electoral mandate of 1972.

Nixon would have enjoyed the irony of today’s viral videos. In one final clip, he grins and says, “I’m afraid this is going to disappoint all my enemies out there, because I’m afraid I’m gonna outlive them.”

Half a century after Watergate, millions of young Americans are still listening to him. Nixon appears to have outlived the verdict his enemies wrote for him.