'Only roll over for their cult leader': Hillary Clinton torches Vance over Watergate dismissal

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton rebuked Vice President JD Vance on Saturday for suggesting that the Watergate scandal would be a mere 12-hour news story in 2026, quipping that he may not know his history because it is covered in one of the books his administration has banned without mentioning the name. "The difference between Watergate and now is that back then, Republicans actually did something about a law-breaking president. Today, they only roll over for their cult leader," she wrote on X.

Clinton's comments came in the wake of Vance's appearance at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in California, where he called the idea that Watergate would have taken down a presidency "crazy." Vance added: "I am actually fascinated by Richard Nixon as a character in history. I think his historical legacy is enjoying a bit of a renaissance, and I think deservedly so," he asserted.

The 41-year-old drew a comparison between the political forces that pushed Nixon out of office and those he sees as opponents of President Donald Trump. "If you look at the story of how the deep state took down Richard Nixon," Vance said, "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. There is a parallel."

The real thrust of Vance's comments, according to CNN, was not to rehabilitate Nixon but to minimize Trump's controversies. The network noted that much of the effort to burnish Nixon's image appears to be aimed at downplaying Trump's problems, and that framing Watergate as no big deal — or as a deep state operation — could lead people to view allegations of Trump's corruption in a similar light.

Nixon resigned from the presidency in 1974 after the scandal broke and he was staring at an impeachment vote that he would have lost for sure. Trump is the only president to be impeached twice: once for abusing his power by pressuring Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to investigate his then-rival Joe Biden under threat of withholding military aid, and a second time for inciting an insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on January 6 in a bid to overturn his 2020 election defeat.

Vance, who is widely touted as a frontrunner for the 2028 Republican presidential nomination, also drew a comparison between himself and Nixon, who was forced to resign after using his office to cover up the break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington. "Young senator, vice president, writes some best-selling books, is hated by the media," Vance remarked. "It kind of sounds like JD Vance."