Richard Nixon’s Instagram Makeover

WHEN PRESIDENT RICHARD NIXON left office in 1974, he did so in utter disgrace. He was hounded out of the White House after federal inquiries exposed a sprawling campaign of espionage and obstruction, and a bipartisan impeachment effort left him with historically low approval ratings.

But lately, he’s been doing great on Instagram.

Since last June, the Nixon Foundation, a nonprofit that runs the Nixon Presidential Library in Yorba Linda jointly with the federal government, has produced a steady churn of viral content — sleek, sexy edits of archival footage set to trending music — that looks more like promo material for a hip-hop artist than a disgraced, long-dead president. 

The Gen Z-coded videos show Nixon leading crowds of suited men to Biggie’s “Hypnotize,” and delivering speeches in packed stadiums to "WE ON GO" by the rapper BIA. In the videos, Nixon projects what one commenter called “absolute aura,” and the foundation has more than doubled its Instagram following to 105,000 in the last year. (As a testament to the foundation’s social media success, a limited run of “Nixonmaxxing” hats it produced quickly sold out in February. “In my Nixon era rn” one commenter said; “Gen Z is Nixonmaxxing hard af” and “Nixon still aura farming 30 years after the grave,” said others.)

But interspersed among the hype videos are posts that hint at a concerted effort to do more than rosy the president’s image. These reels suggest that Watergate was a “set up”; that deep state actors are responsible for bringing him down; that Bob Woodward and the Washington Post “framed” him; and that the media is, in fact, still out to get him.

“If you look at the history of Watergate, you see that it was a set up from start to finish,” said the conservative activist Christopher Rufo, who is the architect of Donald Trump’s attack on higher education, in one clip shared by the foundation. “In time, I think we’re going to see Nixon vindicated and the history around Nixon will be changed.”

Alternative histories of Watergate are as old as the scandal itself. Theorists across the political spectrum have long suggested, without solid evidence, that the infamous Watergate burglary was staged by the CIA in an effort to oust Nixon, or that the ensuing scandal was largely the work of vindictive deep state actors who wanted him out. (These theorists tend to leave out the well-documented conduct by Nixon and his inner circle which occurred separate from the Watergate burglary and resulted in prison sentences for many of his aides.)

But the Gen Z-focused content by the Nixon Foundation epitomizes a new strain of Watergate revisionism that began around the start of Donald Trump’s first presidency.

A growing movement of young conservatives are lionizing Nixon, celebrating his attacks on the media, academia, and his political opponents, while bolstering conspiracy theories that exonerate him of wrongdoing, said Michael Koncewicz, Associate Director of New York University's Institute for Public Knowledge and author of “They Said No to Nixon.”

“In the last 10 years, Nixon has become a more powerful symbol as a martyr for the cause,” Koncewicz said. “What started off as a fairly fringe take now has become very mainstream.”

A case in point: In 2021, Vice President J.D. Vance said Nixon had shown “wisdom” in his stance toward academia. “He said, and I quote: ‘The professors are the enemy,’” Vance said. 

Figures like Rufo, Tucker Carlson, and Joe Rogan have bolstered alternative Watergate theories at a moment when public trust in government and media is cratering and Trump has upended norms of the presidency.

Garrett Graff, the author of “Watergate: A New History,” called the foundation’s social media content “immature and a-historical.”

“There's so much to celebrate about Richard Nixon and his legacy and what he did for the country,” Graff said, such as his founding of the Environmental Protection Agency and foreign policy accomplishments in China. “There’s enough good stuff about Richard Nixon that you don’t need to traffic in other people’s gutter conspiracies that are just historically inaccurate.”

The Nixon Foundation declined multiple requests for interviews. In an emailed statement, the foundation wrote that it has “embraced what social media offers to inform the next generation” about Nixon’s legacy.

“The rapid increase in engagement with our content has resulted in an explosion of curiosity and interest — and that speaks for itself,” the foundation wrote.

Jim Byron, the foundation’s CEO, recently returned from a brief stint running the National Archives and Records Administration under the Trump administration. Chris Barber, the foundation’s director of marketing and communications, is a former social media manager at the conservative advocacy group Prager U, where he produced such viral videos as: “Dear woke people. Not everything is because of racism.”

The Nixon Foundation itself is no stranger to controversy. In 1990, Hugh Hewitt, the then-director of the library, resigned after saying that Bob Woodward would be denied access to the facility because “he’s not a responsible journalist.” Two decades later, when the then-private library merged with the system run by the National Archives and Records Administration, a fight broke out over an effort to revise a Watergate exhibit that critics panned as entirely partisan.

(Today, you cannot buy Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s “All the President’s Men” in the museum’s bookstore, but you can buy a Nixon aide’s account of the supposed CIA conspiracy to oust the president — as well as a “Pretty Girls for Nixon” tote for $39.95.)

“Peoples’ memories are very short,” said the journalist Leon Neyfakh, who hosted a Slate podcast about Watergate. “I don’t think they’d be wrong to believe that the next generation of conservatives are up for grabs in terms of winning them over for Nixon.”

Tomo Chien can be reached at [email protected] or tomo.213 on Signal.