The Trump Administration wants us to think that corruption is normal

At 1:24 p.m. this afternoon in Yorba Linda, California, Vice President J.D. Vance sat in a tall cream-colored chair, shifting back and forth. With a microphone in his right hand, he awkwardly reached for his water glass, removed the lid, and then decided this was the perfect moment to attempt a joke about Gavin Newsom before excitedly sharing that his grandmother died with 19 loaded guns scattered throughout her house. He spoke for nearly 40 minutes and tried, over and over again, to prove he had presidential potential. He failed each time. But buried within those failed attempts was 1 minute and 7 seconds that changed the entire interview, when he said something nobody could have ever expected J.D. Vance to say out loud, not because it was wrong, but because it was true, and because he didn’t seem to realize what he’d just confessed.

While sitting inside the library of the only president ever forced to resign over abuse of power, Vance declared that Nixon’s “historical legacy is enjoying a bit of a renaissance, and I think deservedly so.” He then argued that if Watergate happened today, it would amount to “like a 12-hour news story,” calling it “crazy” that the scandal ever brought down a presidency. From there, he claimed that the same type of “deep state” institutions that brought down Nixon also tried to bring down Donald Trump in his first presidency, before comparing himself to Nixon, saying they were both young senators, vice presidents, bestselling authors, hated by the media, and concluding, “I’ve always liked Richard Nixon.”

In trying to romanticize Richard Nixon’s corruption, J.D. Vance took it further, making the strongest case yet for just how far America’s standards for presidential misconduct have fallen. Because the Vice President of the United States wasn’t simply defending Richard Nixon. He was asking Americans to view Watergate, once considered the defining presidential scandal in modern history, as something so insignificant by today’s standards that it would barely survive a single news cycle. It was a direct attempt to redefine what Americans should and should not consider presidential misconduct.

And that’s the part he didn’t realize he was admitting. Because if Watergate would barely make the news today, then what he’s really saying is that the scandals surrounding Donald Trump have become so much larger, so much more constant, and so all-consuming that the crime which once brought down a president would now barely interrupt the news cycle. Nixon’s corruption didn’t become smaller. Our tolerance for presidential corruption became much larger because Donald Trump keeps pushing the boundaries of what Americans are expected to accept.

What the Vice President said was an accidental confession about just how dramatically the standards of American democracy have eroded.

And it goes deeper than just that one moment. Because what J.D. Vance said wasn’t an isolated slip. It reflects a broader strategy this administration has been pursuing for months. They are choosing their words carefully, not to elevate our politics, but to lower the standards of what Americans are expected to tolerate. If you can normalize the language, you can normalize the behavior that follows.

On May 11, Donald Trump sat in the Oval Office during a maternal health event and unveiled what he has now turned into his favorite new word for the Democratic Party: “Dumbocrats.” He said, “We have their name, the Dumbocrats, because they’re dumb. They’re dumb people.” He has used that word repeatedly in the weeks since, at the G7 Summit, on Truth Social, and at rallies. Last Saturday, he even ran a poll asking his followers whether they preferred the spelling “Dumocrat” or “Dumbocrat,” workshopping the insult and crowdsourcing it to make sure it sticks. It is easy to look at that and dismiss it as another childish Trump moment. But this is the President of the United States manufacturing demeaning language for an entire political party, and anyone who aligns with their resistance against him. This is language that millions of his supporters will adopt and repeat, language designed to strip the opposition of legitimacy before voters go to the polls in November.

Then on Wednesday night, the language escalated. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy stood on a stage on the National Mall at Trump’s Great American State Fair, warming up the crowd for the president, and praised the military bands before saying, “Way better than those libtards that canceled on us. So much better. Thank you guys. President Trump will make you famous.” A sitting cabinet secretary used a derogatory slur aimed at political opponents at a government-adjacent event on the National Mall. When HuffPost asked him to clarify his remarks, Duffy did not apologize and did not walk it back. So far, there have been no consequences. The test worked, and they will just keep building upon it.

And while the administration was testing what language Americans would tolerate, it was also testing what actions Americans would accept. The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool has been a disaster for the president. A project that exceeded the original estimate by millions and was rushed to completion ahead of the nation’s 250th anniversary. When the renovation immediately failed, with algae blooming across the surface and the new blue paint peeling from the bottom, the administration did not take responsibility for the botched project that it had commissioned, overseen, and accelerated. Instead, Donald Trump is continuing to claim, without evidence, that vandals had slashed the pool’s lining and poured chemicals into the water. So far, five people have been arrested for vandalism. Five more were issued federal citations. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro then went on television to warn the public that anyone who damages or even “impacts” the Reflecting Pool could face criminal prosecution. National Guard members were deployed to the site, approaching visitors to remind them not to touch the water, or they could be arrested. The administration rushed a project, the project failed because of their own incompetence, and instead of admitting the failure, they arrested people who touched the pool.

This is how authoritarian normalization works, and it never happens all at once. You test the language first. You see if anyone stops you. Nobody does. You escalate the language. A cabinet secretary says “libtards” on a government stage. Nobody stops you. You test the action. You arrest citizens for touching the evidence of your own failure. Nobody stops you. And then you rehabilitate historical corruption itself. A vice president sitting in a presidential library, and tells America that the scandal that once brought down a president wouldn’t even last in the news cycle very long. Each one of these, taken on its own, can be dismissed as a gaffe, a joke, an overreaction, another Trump thing. But taken together, they are rehearsals. They are an administration testing the limits of what Americans will tolerate, and every test that passes without consequence gives permission for the next one.

We are now less than five months from the midterm elections. Every one of these tests is calibrated toward November. The language is designed to dehumanize the opposition before voters go to the polls. The arrests are designed to intimidate. And the Nixon rehabilitation is designed to tell Americans that the corruption they’ve already witnessed doesn’t matter, has never mattered, and should never have been grounds for accountability in the first place. The message Vance delivered today from that cream-colored chair, whether he understood it or not, was simple: stop expecting consequences.

Today, while J.D. Vance was telling Americans that Watergate wouldn’t matter anymore, a story was making its way through the legal system that tells a very different story about consequences. And it shows that the administration’s strategy may contain the seeds of its own unraveling.

In December 2025, Donald Trump filed a $10 billion defamation lawsuit against the BBC over a Panorama documentary called “Trump: A Second Chance?” The documentary edited together portions of Trump’s January 6 speech in a way that made it appear he had urged supporters to march with him and “fight like hell” before they attacked the Capitol. The BBC has apologized for the misleading edit but has argued there is no basis for a defamation claim and is fighting to have the lawsuit dismissed. Trump filed the lawsuit because he could not tolerate being embarrassed by a British documentary that most Americans never even saw.

And now that lawsuit is becoming something Donald Trump never anticipated. In a new legal filing reviewed by Newsweek and reported today, Trump’s own attorneys are complaining that the BBC is “attempting to use this action as a vehicle to conduct a trial as to the events that occurred on January 6th.” The BBC’s lawyers have requested through discovery Trump’s telephone logs, his calendars, his schedules, and his daily diaries from November 3, 2020, to January 20, 2021. They have requested documents related to the “Stop the Steal” rally and Trump’s communications with key advisers, including Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller, and Rudy Giuliani. They have formally subpoenaed the Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust, managed by Donald Trump Jr., which holds the president’s business interests and assets. Trump’s attorneys are calling these requests “drastically far afield from the issues in this action.” The case is currently set to go to trial in February 2027.

Jack Smith’s prosecution was shut down. The congressional January 6 investigation was completed, but its consequences were blunted by sweeping pardons. The January 6 accountability that so many Americans wanted disappeared when he was re-elected. And then Donald Trump, because his ego would not allow him to let a British documentary go unanswered, filed a lawsuit and handed the BBC’s lawyers the legal standing to demand every record of what he did between Election Day 2020 and Inauguration Day 2021. He opened the door himself. And now he is complaining that the BBC walked through it.

Nobody forced him to do this. This is not a prosecution. This is not a congressional subpoena. This is a lawsuit that Donald Trump chose to file in a court he chose because he wanted $10 billion from a public broadcaster. And the legal process he set in motion is now demanding exactly the kind of evidence that brought down Richard Nixon: the phone logs, the schedules, the communications, the minute-by-minute record of what the president was doing while the Capitol was under attack. Nixon had the tapes. Donald Trump may end up producing his own.

Whether this case goes to trial in February or settles before it gets there, the discovery requests alone have already told us something important. The legal architecture of accountability is still functioning, even when it looks like it’s been dismantled. The truth has a way of surfacing, even when powerful people spend years trying to bury it. Nixon learned that lesson. And J.D. Vance, sitting in Nixon’s Presidential Library, accidentally told us that this administration knows it too. Their entire strategy, the language, the arrests, the rehabilitation of Nixon’s legacy, all of it is designed to convince Americans that the truth no longer matters. But a courtroom in Florida, powered by a lawsuit that Donald Trump filed with his own hand, is quietly proving them wrong.

The one thing this administration cannot control, no matter how many words they manufacture or how many people they arrest for touching peeling paint, is the truth. The truth does not disappear because they rewrite the narrative. And consequences do not disappear because they stop believing in them. Consequences have a way of catching up to those who spend their lives convinced they are untouchable. They are patient. They are relentless. And for some of the people responsible for bringing us to this moment, they are already beginning to arrive in the very courtrooms Donald Trump helped build for himself. That is why I still have hope for America. And you should, too.

I’ll see you tomorrow,
Heather

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This commentary represents my personal opinions and analysis of matters of public concern, informed by publicly available information. Any references to individuals constitute opinion and commentary protected under the First Amendment.

Picture of the day: I went to a few bookstores looking for Regime Change, the new book by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan. It was sold out. But I did find this display, stacked floor-to-ceiling with copies of J.D. Vance’s Communion. What caught my eye was the quote they chose to promote the books with. Please tell me you see the irony in this choice, too?

Sources:

https://www.wral.com/news/ap/9a821-vance-an-admirer-of-richard-nixon-says-watergate-would-be-a-a-12-hour-news-story-today/

https://www.nixonfoundation.org/event/the-honorable-jd-vance-at-the-nixon-library/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/06/25/vance-dismisses-watergate-scandal-says-deep-state-went-after-nixon/

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/white-house/4625921/vance-richard-nixon-watergate-trump/

https://www.rawstory.com/jd-vance-says-the-quiet-part-out-loud-as-mockery-abounds-over-surprising-nixon-comment/

https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/jd-vances-bizarre-defense-nixon-003442487.html

https://www.thewrap.com/media-platforms/politics/trump-truth-social-poll-ice-nice-dumocrats-dumbocrats/

https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/trump-coined-dumbocrats-nickname-democrats-124238499.html

https://www.rawstory.com/sean-duffy-libtards/

https://www.themirror.com/entertainment/sean-duffy-message-freedom-250-1904934

https://abcnews.com/Politics/trump-multiple-people-arrested-alleged-vandalism-lincoln-memorial/story?id=134065497

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-reflecting-pool-vandalism-arrest-washington-dc/

https://www.npr.org/2026/06/21/nx-s1-5865636/trump-reflecting-pool-dc-vandals-drain-green

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2026/06/20/cyclist-arrested-reflecting-pool-denies-trump-vandalism-claims/

https://www.wusa9.com/article/news/politics/arrests-made-amid-vandalism-concerns-at-reflecting-pool-as-cleanup-efforts-continue/65-edf5df48-aeaf-42be-ad34-5810ad782a21

https://www.fox5dc.com/news/felony-warning-issued-arrests-reported-reflecting-pool

https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-bbc-lawsuit-january-6-trial-12119508

https://www.newsweek.com/bbc-hits-back-in-donald-trump-10-billion-lawsuit-panorama-11546607

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/bbc-files-dismiss-trump-defamation-suit-jan-6-speech-1235531743/

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/bbc-asks-court-to-dismiss-trumps-10b-lawsuit-over-jan-6-speech