The ongoing efforts to rehabilitate Richard Nixon by the MAGA right and various commentators, as well as Vice President JD Vance, represents a brazen attempt to whitewash the stain on the American escutcheon inflicted by the Watergate President, for the purpose of “normalizing” his politics, his sweeping acts of usurpation and abuse of power, to furnish President Trump with a historical precedent to absolve him of his Nixonian assault on our constitutional system. This revisionism — “Nixonmaxxing” — should be understood for the menace that is: an exercise in constitutional strip mining.
If Nixon had succeeded in the implementation of his theory of the scope of executive power, he would have torn down the planks and pillars of America’s constitutional democracy and laid waste to the rule of law. Those who “miss” Nixon and believe, like Vice President Vance, that he was “taken down by a deep state coup,” precisely the sort that has sought, in his opinion, to take down Trump, are engaging in willful blindness or are utterly oblivious to Nixon’s existential threat to our constitutional democracy.
Nixon was riding the tendencies of the “Imperial Presidency,” a term aptly coined by Arthur Schlesinger Jr., to describe Nixon’s general indifference to constitutional restraints, his contempt for the rule of law and his belief in the investment of the sovereignty of the nation in the chief executive. Any doubts about the scope of the Nixon Doctrine were laid to rest by Nixon himself in the third television interview with David Frost that was aired on May 19, 1977.
In that interview, Nixon declared that the president, like the Stuart kings of England, could do no wrong. He told Frost, “When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.” Not only is the president above the law, according to Nixon, but he could “authorize” staff members to violate the law as well. These are radical conceptions of executive power that turn the Constitution on its head. Certainly, they are contemptuous of all that the framers of the Constitution undertook to create in drafting Article II, and they find no footing in the Convention debates or the train of thought that ran through Philadelphia. No delegate even squinted in that direction. Nixon’s revolutionary message ignored the framers’ commitment to the subordination of the president to the rule of law.
Those who would rehabilitate Nixon’s reputation minimize the core of his legacy: Watergate. They minimize it by claiming sweeping powers for the presidency, despite that fact that their views, like Nixon’s, find no foundation in the architecture of the Constitution. They further minimize it through attacks on the “unrestrained” judicial system that, they claim, violated Nixon’s due process rights, and aggrandized powers to examine and rule against Nixon’s acts. Nixon’s acolytes ignore the fact that the Supreme Court’s unanimous, 8-0 opinion, which rejected the president’s claim of “absolute” executive privilege in U.S. Nixon (1974), was written by Chief Justice Warren Burger, whom Nixon nominated to the nation’s high bench. This was no judicial coup against the president, but rather a court committed to preserving the rule of law and the framers’ conceptualization of executive power.
Donald Trump is the second coming of Richard Nixon, but thus far Trump has succeeded where Nixon failed. Trump’s usurpations of core legislative powers have continued unabated. His view of executive power, which he has expressed as “absolute power under Article II,” is an imitation of Nixon’s. Nixon claimed that he could deputize aides and advisers to violate the law. Trump pardoned the 1,600 insurrectionists who sought to halt a fundamental constitutional process — the peaceful transfer of power. Nixon was stopped in his tracks and forced to resign the office of the presidency by a combination of judicial, legislative and popular power. Trump, on the other hand, has not been stopped by a similar combination but, indeed, has seen his power swell beyond limits, as the judiciary and Congress have become handmaidens to Trump’s trampling of constitutional principles and the rule of law.
Trump’s minions and acolytes, those who would normalize Trump’s authoritarianism through an exercise in historical revisionism that would rehabilitate the only man ever to resign the presidency, have picked a lowly model for Trump’s legacy. They are not defenders of the Constitution, but rather hatchet men who strike blow after blow to the law of the land.
David Adler, Ph.D., is president of Alturas Institute, which advances the Constitution, civic education and equal protection.
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