Vice President JD Vance compared himself to former President Richard M. Nixon and minimized the scandal that took down the disgraced president decades ago, saying the theft and coverup wouldn't end a presidency if it happened in today's fast-moving news cycle.

"If Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be a 12-hour news story," the vice president said on Thursday at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in Yorba Linda, Calif. "The idea that it would have taken down a presidency is crazy."

Vance likened himself to Nixon, who resigned in 1974 after he lost support of Congress over the scandal. "Young senator, vice president, writes some bestselling books, is hated by the media," he said. "It kind of sounds like JD Vance. I've always liked Richard Nixon."

Vance, 41 years old, is considered a front-runner for the 2028 Republican nomination for president. He is on a book tour for his second book, "Communion," in which he writes about his conversion to Catholicism. He is spending the week in California, and raised money in Palo Alto this week as part of his role as Republican National Committee finance chairman.

Vance called Nixon a political genius and said the former Republican president's legacy was "enjoying a bit of a renaissance," with attention being focused on Nixon's diplomatic efforts to end the Vietnam War and open relations with China.

Vance praised Nixon for clearly defining his objectives in foreign policy, when asked to compare Nixon's peacekeeping efforts with his own work to craft an agreement with Iran to stop Tehran from acquiring a nuclear weapon.

The Watergate scandal began with a botched break-in of the Democratic national headquarters in 1972 at the Watergate office complex in Washington by operatives working on behalf of the Nixon re-election effort. It was followed, almost immediately, by a White House-led coverup.

Nixon was re-elected in a landslide in 1972, but a Senate investigation ultimately led him to resign, once impeachment looked likely.

Dozens of people were charged in connection with the affair, among them government officials including two cabinet members and the White House chief of staff. Many of them were convicted or pleaded guilty, and some were jailed. Nixon was pardoned by President Gerald Ford.

The scandal sparked mass distrust in government and prompted Congress to pass a series of measures designed to rein in presidential power: the War Powers Resolution, new campaign-finance rules, new budget procedures, the creation of the Congressional Budget Office and the independent-counsel statute.

Vance, who has in the past acknowledged that he is a conspiracy theorist, blamed Nixon's downfall on the "deep state" -- an entrenched network of unelected bureaucrats capable of obstructing the policy objectives of elected officials. He said that the same forces tried to thwart President Trump's first term.

Vance also said the coalition that brought Nixon his large victory in 1972 was similar to the coalition that elected Trump in 2024.

"Richard Nixon maybe could have won his landslide in 2024, and I think that there's a very important political lesson in that for all of us in the Republican party -- he was actually like a political genius," Vance said.

Like many of his predecessors, Vance uses a desk that was also used by Nixon in the vice president's ceremonial office. It bears the signatures of past people who have been next in the line of succession.

Trump in 2020 said he learned a lot from Nixon. One of those lessons, he said, was "don't fire people," a reference to the Saturday Night Massacre, in which Nixon ousted the special prosecutor and other investigators looking into the scandal.

There were some differences, Trump said in the interview with Fox News' Fox & Friends: "Number one, he may have been guilty. And number two, he had tapes all over the place. I wasn't guilty. I did nothing wrong, and there are no tapes. But I wish there were tapes in my case."

Write to Natalie Andrews at natalie.andrews@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

June 26, 2026 14:47 ET (18:47 GMT)

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