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He’s tanned, rested and ready — and he’s been dead for 32 years.
Amazingly, Richard Nixon, the most nefarious American political personality of the 1970s, appears to be making a comeback, at least online. It’s being called Nixonmaxxing, and it involves a series of slickly edited social media videos that cut archival Nixon footage to rap tracks and turn the 37th president into the sort of stone-cold, sigma male-style antihero that Gen Z bros can’t get enough of these days.
As it turns out, the videos are the work of the Richard Nixon Foundation, a Yorba Linda, California-based nonprofit founded in 1983 — by Nixon himself — that has long been dedicated to protecting Tricky Dick’s public image. Which they’ve now apparently decided should look something like Walton Goggins in a Tarantino pic.
Of course, Nixon has never fully disappeared from the pop culture ether. Over the decades, he’s popped up as a head-in-a-bottle on Futurama, had a whole story arc on HBO’s Watchmen, appeared on rubber masks during a bank robbery in Point Break and most recently turned up in Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day, where he’s shown giving a tour of dead alien bodies at a secret government base — a nod to a bonkers bit of UFO lore in which Nixon supposedly took his golfing pal Jackie Gleason to an Air Force base in Florida to show off top secret E.T. corpses.
