JD Vance Gives the Game Away

He basically admitted that the populist right is first and foremost a crusade against accountability

“If Watergate happened tomorrow,” Vice-President JD Vance said at Richard Nixon’s Presidential library last week, “it would be a twelve-hour news story.” He went on to defend the disgraced former President, whose Watergate cover-up is so synonymous with corruption that we still use the ‘-gate’ suffix for public fiascos to this day.

Breaking from his usual posture of moral superiority, Vance seemed to imply that he and his boss are involved in so many Watergates that the media just can’t keep up.

But his argument was that Nixon’s resignation over Watergate was the product of a malign “deep state” plot – led by the same shadowy “institutions” that sought to take down Donald Trump.

He’s referring, of course, to basic democratic checks on executive power. The real scandal for Vance was that Congress, the courts, prosecutors, journalists and ultimately members of Nixon’s own party were able to force a sitting president out of office. Nixon was pardoned soon after he resigned, but even the bare minimum accountability he faced is recast as illegitimate persecution.

Now from a strategic perspective, it makes sense why Vance might rehabilitate Nixon and minimise Watergate. After all, if that defining scandal wasn’t a valid cause for outrage at our leaders, then what is?

Vance’s name is inexorably attached to Donald Trump’s litany of scandals – a President that has used public office to enrich himself to the tune of roughly $4 billion (per one estimate in The New Yorker). Who has pardoned countless political allies, business cronies, and seditious far-right rioters. Who has transparently set the judicial and military powers of the state against his political foes. Who has gone to great lengths to insulate himself from egregious accusations relating to his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.

But more crucially, I think Vance is giving us an insight into what today’s populist right parties – practically always elite-led and funded whether in the US or Europe – are really about. At the leadership level (I don’t think this is always true of their voters necessarily), they believe in utter impunity for the powerful few.

The supposedly righteous, born leaders – members of the political-economic elite like Nixon and Trump – can’t do wrong, they can only be wronged.

They usually can’t say that out loud, so they’ll continue to rile up voters with fiery rhetoric about DEI, about mass immigration, benefits claimants, or woke college students. I suspect the conversations they’re having in smoky backrooms are very, very different.

Thanks to the Epstein files, we can actually glimpse some of those conversations. We know that MAGA architect Steve Bannon and Jeffrey Epstein sought to use Trump’s movement to stave off women’s campaigns against sexual harassment in the workplace. We know the pair – and a host of their billionaire friends – also saw the populist right as a vehicle to advance a deregulated cryptocurrency agenda which would let them move money around with much less scrutiny.

I’ve looked through quite a lot of these files, and they show us not only that a powerful group of people saw themselves as utterly immune from the rule of law, but how they also saw right-wing populism in both Europe and the United States as a vehicle to insulate themselves from democracy and accountability.

Trump proved this almost immediately after returning to office. Alongside Elon Musk, he set about dismantling accountability mechanisms across government - from the rules that bound his own behaviour to regulators that contend with financial fraud, pollution, workplace discrimination and more.

Britain is of course just as susceptible to all of this.

While the architects of Brexit – one of whom could conceivably be our next Prime Minister – ran their campaign on immigration scare-mongering, it was frequently pitched to wealthy donors and business leaders as an opportunity to dodge EU financial regulations and avoid laws that would make them accountable.

Just this week, Nigel Farage (who calls Donald Trump “The Boss”), had a tetchy interview where he claimed “it’s not the public’s business” to know the details of the £5 million personal gift he received from a Thailand-based crypto billionaire. We don’t have the right to even ask, he says, why he wants to scrap all of the regulations for a notoriously scammy industry after one of its wealthiest figures bankrolled his return to Parliament.

Whether it’s a political executive or a corporate one, a polluter dumping sewage or a crypto scammer duping the public, the populist right across the West doesn’t fundamentally believe the powerful should be held accountable (unless you disagree with them).

So what Vance said this week revealed more than he intended. He was not just indulging in a bit of revisionist history. He was saying the quiet part out loud.

For the populist right, Watergate was not a warning about what happens when leaders place themselves above the law; it was a warning about what happens when the law still has enough force to reach them.

Vance, Trump, Farage and others posture as insurgents fighting a broken establishment, but what they really hate are the remaining parts of that establishment that can still tell powerful men “No.”

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