JD Vance considered it “crazy” that Richard Nixon had to resign following the Watergate scandal, judging that nowadays, this affair of political espionage “would not occupy the media for more than twelve hours. »
• Also read: Alexander Butterfield, key witness to Watergate scandal, dies
“I think the legacy [de l’ancien président républicain] is undergoing a sort of rehabilitation, but I think it is deserved,” the American vice-president said Thursday, during an intervention from the “Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum” in California.
“As I said jokingly […]if Watergate happened tomorrow, it wouldn’t occupy the media for more than twelve hours. The idea that this brought down a presidency is crazy,” added JD Vance, potential candidate for the White House in 2028.
This file photo taken on April 30, 1973 shows U.S. President Richard Nixon taking full responsibility for the Watergate scandal during a speech broadcast to the American people in Washington, DC.
AFP
These comments “say a lot about the moral and ethical degradation of the Trump era,” criticized David Axelrod, a commentator close to the Democratic Party, on X.
The Watergate scandal began with the arrest in 1972 of five men caught burglarizing the Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate building in Washington.
Richard Nixon, the outgoing Republican president, was then campaigning for a second term, and he was comfortably re-elected in November of the same year.
A Washington Post investigation subsequently revealed a vast system of political espionage, as well as an attempted cover-up orchestrated at the highest level by the White House.
After a long legal battle and facing the threat of impeachment proceedings by Congress, Richard Nixon resigned in 1974, a first in the history of the United States.
