Low Bar
The vice president said the scandal was no big deal and claimed it was perpetrated by the “deep state”
President Donald Trump’s corruption is so pervasive that the types of scandals that once would have toppled — or at least threatened — the stability of a presidency barely register as a blip in the news cycle. J.D. Vance likes it this way, and is now trying to retroactively apply the low standard across history.
While promoting his new book on Thursday, the vice president claimed that Richard Nixon, the only American president ever to resign from office in the face of a scandal, was experiencing a “renaissance.”
“If Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be like a 12-hour news story. The idea that it would have taken down a presidency is crazy,” Vance mused during a talk at the Richard Nixon Foundation in Yorba Linda, California. He went on to claim that the way the “deep state” had taken down Nixon was “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.”
