Nixon’s back, back again
Welcome to the Nixon Renaissance, where “Tricky Dick” is cool and Watergate was a set-up.
For more than half a century, the Watergate scandal has served as the very definition of political corruption and scandal, evolving into a nearly omnipresent suffix: Bridgegate, Pizzagate, Gamergate … the list goes on in an ever-unspooling indictment of President Richard Nixon, long derided by Republicans and Democrats alike as a crook.
Can young Republicans change that?
They’re certainly trying. Driven by conservatives too young to remember Watergate as an actual event, rather than a mythologized bit of history, Nixon-mania is surging through the right-of-center media-sphere. Conservative magazines are reexamining Nixon’s foreign policy. Conservative activist Christopher Rufo is studying his presidency as a “blueprint for counter-revolution.” Nixon’s mug is all over TikTok and, we regret to inform you, the most irony poisoned corners of the internet are reaching dangerous levels of thirst for Tricky Dick.
Why the sudden rise in Nixon standom? Partly, it’s because the youths are genuinely interested in his presidency. But push them on this, and you uncover the real reason: former President Donald Trump.
“In the topsy-turvy historical tableau of 2023, to defend Nixon is to back Trump,” writes POLITICO’s Ian Ward in this week’s Friday Read, “and to rescue the former from historical ignominy is, according to the thinking of some young conservatives, to save the latter from the same fate.”
“Trump is Woody Allen without the humor.”
Can you guess who wrote this about then-President Donald Trump in 2017? Scroll to the bottom for the answer.**
Melania Trump, Naturalized Citizen … Today at 10 a.m., when the National Archives hosts a naturalization ceremony for new U.S. citizens from 25 countries, they’ll have a surprising speaker there to welcome them: Melania Trump, the only first lady to be an immigrant herself. She was invited by an archivist — an odd choice by an ostensibly non-political institution for too many reasons to name here, among them: Her husband will be on the ballot in Iowa in just weeks; his anti-immigration stances are a major part of his brand; and it was the National Archives that spurred the investigation into his alleged mishandling of secret documents. “It is, to put it mildly, an unusual billing,” writes Michael Schaffer, who peels back the layers of awkward in this week’s Capital City column.
A quarter century ago, Capital One Arena was credited with reviving a dreary downtown Washington. Which is why this week's news of a planned move to Virginia by the city's NHL and NBA teams felt so seismic — not so much for sports fans as for folks who care about the city’s health. Here’s what to say about it when talking to a D.C. die-hard (from Capital City columnist Michael Schaffer):
— Conservatives will probably agree with the team’s owner that crime has hurt the stadium’s once-buzzy neighborhood. Hit them with a line like, “When Ted Leonsis complains about crime, he has a point: Murder and carjackings are up.”-Talking to people who are out to get Big Tech? Blame Amazon. The stadium is slated to be part of a privatized, tech-biz insta-city going up around HQ2 — with taxpayer help.
— Grumpy HR departments will like the version of the story that blames work-from-home types: “Central D.C. is a ghost town compared to pre-Covid times. With all those feds and private-sector workers Zooming from home, there's no point keeping a stadium downtown.”
— You’ll need something insightful to drop into the sports-obsessed group chat: “New stadiums these days are always part of a big real estate play the team can use to rake in even more dough. Building hotels and venues and restaurants takes land — and that’s something downtowns don’t have.”
— And your lefty friends will want to hear you blast a greedy mogul: “Taxpayers helped build the current stadium, and now he says it’s obsolete after just 25 years just because tycoon tastes changed. Now another jurisdiction is subsidizing a new one? Good luck in 2048.”
If Putin Wins … According to Russia expert and sought-after political adviser Fiona Hill, the ongoing debate over U.S. support for Ukraine isn’t just about Ukraine — it’s about our own future. As the House debated funding Kyiv’s resistance before sending a defense bill to President Biden this week, POLITICO Magazine’s Maura Reynolds spoke to Hill about America’s critical role in determining the outcome of the war — and what happens if Putin wins. “For Putin, Ukraine is a proxy war against the United States,” Hill said, “to remove the United States from the world stage.”
What You Should Actually Read About the University President Drama … The presidents of Harvard, Penn and MIT have commanded overwhelming attention from both Congress and the media over the last couple weeks for their heavily criticized House testimony on antisemitism, which led Penn president Elizabeth Magill to resign. Hedge fund manager Bill Ackman has been leading the charge online to take their jobs, and according to POLITICO’s Calder McHugh, a look back at his investment strategy lends insights into his social media crusade. “Just like with his high-profile stances in the investment world, Ackman shows no signs of relenting,” McHugh writes.
As for the underlying issue at hand, POLITICO Magazine contributor Evan Mandery believes the whole episode is a dire threat not so much to Jewish students as to academic freedom. “I’m a Jew and, heaven knows, no one has been more critical of elite colleges than I’ve been,” he writes, “but the greatest intellectual threat of these times is neither antisemitism nor Ivy League schools — it’s to academic freedom and the First Amendment’s protection of speech.”
The Next Tsunami Is Coming — But FEMA Won’t Warn You … Back in March, FEMA announced an updated National Risk Index — an online tool built by the federal government to gauge the threat of disaster, help communities prepare and inform the allocation of federal funding. There’s just one problem, writes journalist Eric Scigliano: The tool is “oblivious to dangers along the Cascadia Subduction Zone,” where the odds of an 8.7-plus megaquake that would produce a 30-foot-plus tsunami in the next 50 years are estimated at 1 in 6. Washington State’s Emergency Management Division says a quake and tsunami in the region would be “the largest natural disaster ever in the United States.” But the index surprisingly calls the threat to the Hoh Tribe on the Long Beach Peninsula, which faces the highest waves, “low.” “In fact, the index is so burdened with structural flaws, gaps in the data it selects from various federal databases, and ignorance of actual conditions on the ground, that many veteran emergency managers and planners see only limited, if any, utility in it,” Scigliano writes — and the stakes are life and death.
**Who Dissed answer: It was the headline of a piece in the Wall Street Journal — “Trump Is Woody Allen Without the Humor” — by Ronald Reagan’s former speechwriter, Peggy Noonan, who pilloried Trump as “whiny, weepy and self-pitying.”
