Of Course JD Vance’s Biggest Political Role Model Is the Guy Who Got Run Out of Office

One of the most embarrassing book tours of the century continued this week, and on Wednesday, Vice President JD Vance spawned at California’s Richard Nixon Presidential Library to joke about P. Diddy failing as a “great Christian theologian,” compare himself to Nixon, and accuse Watergate of being a “deep state” conspiracy. Great!

In his general mass exodus from reality, most shocking was Vance’s reframing of the Watergate scandal, referring to the five men from Nixon’s re-election campaign who got caught burglarizing and wiretapping Democratic headquarters. Nixon’s legacy is “enjoying a bit of a renaissance,” Vance said, adding that “if Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be, like, a 12-hour news story.” Because, apparently, losing our trust in government has become that vogue. 

“The idea that it would have taken down a presidency is crazy,” Vance continued. “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.” 

While Vance isn’t the first to draw comparisons between the two men, he’s certainly one of the first to brag about it. In 2016, Carl Bernstein, one of the two investigative journalists that broke the Watergate scandal in 1972, said of Trump—then the president-elect—that not even Nixon’s lying was as good as Trump’s. 

“No president, including Richard Nixon, has been so ignorant of fact and disdains fact in the way this President-elect does,” Bernstein said at the time. “It has something to do with the growing sense of authoritarianism [Trump] and his presidency are projecting.”

Well, Bernstein evidently called it, because somehow the same party that overhyped Jan. 6 investigations as “worse than Watergate” is now saying Watergate wasn’t actually that bad.

Vance: “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 group of people, the same institutions tried to do to Donald Trump.”

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— The Bulwark (@thebulwark.com) June 25, 2026 at 10:55 PM

 

During another point in the conversation, Nixon was asked about one of the chapters in his books, seeming to reference “Mo Money Mo Problems,” a song by the Notorious B.I.G. and featuring Sean “Diddy” Combs. Did Vance come up with any original titling?

“I’m a millennial, so I believe that’s the wisdom of the great Christian theologian P. Diddy, who as we found out in the last couple of years is very much not a Christian or theologian,” the veep said. “I’m going to get in trouble for all kinds of things. That will be one of them. That will be in an attack ad at some point in the future.” Big talk coming from a guy who seems to constantly be an inch away from getting excommunicated from his own religion.

In the talk, Vance also compared himself to Nixon by saying they share similarities. “Young senator, vice president, writes some bestselling books, is hated by the media,” he said. “It kind of sounds like JD Vance.” Next up on the bucket list, *crosses fingers*, being run out of office.