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Nov. 29, 2025, 7:00 AM ESTBy Tyler Kingkade and Ben KamisarDuring a segment on HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher” in August, activist Christopher Rufo astonished the studio audience when he said the Watergate scandal that toppled President Richard Nixon “was a setup from start to finish.” The crowd hooted. Maher retorted that there were plenty of “smoking guns” showing the late president’s guilt. But Rufo insisted that there were federal agencies that had had illegal backdoor meetings and that there was a judge who was “out to get Nixon.”Maher muttered, “Oh, geez,” to which Rufo replied with a grin and a prediction: “Nixon vindication by 2035.”The Watergate scandal has long been viewed as a defining moment in presidential corruption and accountability, prompting a series of government transparency reforms and influencing generations of journalists. It became a shorthand comparison for political scandal and lent the omnipresent “-gate” suffix to many that followed.But those lessons are now being flipped by some of the most influential right-wing figures, including people known to have President Donald Trump’s ear, who insist that Watergate was actually an underhanded scheme by the “deep state” and the press to take down a popular Republican president.Watergate has often been invoked in comparison to Trump’s scandals, in both his first and current term. Many people — from historians to former Nixon officials — argue that were Watergate to happen in today’s media landscape, with the influence of conservative outlets and in particular Fox News, Nixon most likely would have survived it.“In some ways, the reframing of Watergate seems like an attempt to try and rehabilitate the current president’s image,” said Brendan Gillis, director of teaching and learning initiatives at the American Historical Association, a nonprofit professional organization. “In a lot of ways, it’s about what’s happened the last few years.”Michael Koncewicz, a historian who has been sounding the alarm on Watergate revisionism and who formerly worked at the Nixon presidential library, said the scandal has always been remembered as one in which “the system worked.” But if these pundits “can make Americans believe that that story is bulls—,” he said, “then they can ensure that another Watergate will never happen again.”Beyond Rufo, the conservative media personalities Tucker Carlson, Michael Knowles and Steve Bannon have pushed this revisionist Watergate narrative in the past year. Hillsdale College, a conservative college in Michigan, promoted and endorsed a Carlson podcast episode that described Watergate as a “scam.” Even actor Bill Murray suggested this year on Joe Rogan’s podcast that Nixon might have been “framed.”Republican-controlled states like Idaho and Louisiana have approved a video for use in public school social studies classes that was produced by the conservative media organization PragerU, in which the conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt quotes a historian who argues that Watergate was the media’s attempt to reverse an election.Hewitt, who serves on the board of the Nixon Foundation, contends that the media and the “East Coast liberal elite” had it out for Nixon in part because of his “staunch anti-communist” views. PragerU worked over the past two years with many Republican-led states to get its content into public schools, and it recently partnered with the Trump administration on a civics education initiative. After Rufo’s proclamation on HBO, Marissa Streit, PragerU’s CEO, said he is “right about Nixon!” and directed people to watch Hewitt’s video on X.Through a spokesperson, Streit declined an interview request. In response to specific questions, PragerU said people should watch its Watergate content.Rufo also declined an interview request, but said in an email that the Nixon era is crucial to understanding why he believes politics has been in a loop since 1968. “To understand our moment — and to move beyond it — we must understand Nixon and learn from his experience, his successes, and his failures. BLM, Russiagate, gender ideology, left-wing terrorism: all of our current challenges can be understood through the prism,” Rufo said, of Nixon, “one of the twentieth century’s greatest presidents.”Hillsdale College, Hewitt and Idaho and Louisiana’s education agencies did not respond to requests for comment, nor did Carlson and Bannon’s shows.Kenneth Hughes Jr., a researcher at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, who is considered one of the foremost experts on the audiotapes from Nixon’s White House, said the recordings clearly demonstrate that Nixon was “the ring leader of the abuses of power that we group under the heading of Watergate.” “They do show Nixon deliberately, consciously and illegally weaponizing the government against those he considered political threats,” Hughes said.Nixon has always been a conflicted character in American consciousness. His congressional career defined him as a strident anti-communist, but as president he opened diplomacy with China. Liberals have praised him for signing Title IX and the Environmental Protection Agency into law but criticized his administration for launching a “war on drugs.”After losing the 1960 presidential election and the 1962 California gubernatorial race, Nixon famously told reporters that they “won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore,” only to then become president in 1968 and subsequently win every state except for Massachusetts and the District of Columbia in his 1972 re-election.The scandal that brought down Nixon, in oversimplified terms, centered around his complicity in attempts to cover up the involvement of members in his administration in a botched break-in to bug the Democratic Party’s headquarters. The fallout from the episode then exposed other illegal activity he authorized to go after political enemies.While the twists and turns were widely covered by multiple national media at the time, the scandal was immortalized by the book and film “All the President’s Men,” based on the work of Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein — relying in part on an anonymous source known as “Deep Throat” — to expose the plot.Nixon resigned in August 1974, once it became clear he’d lost the support of many Republicans in Congress and would likely face impeachment.“If Donald Trump and his advisors and his supporters, in the media and within his administration, can alter the history of Watergate, then they can pretty much change anything, and that’s why the history of Watergate matters so much,” said Koncewicz, associate director of New York University’s Institute for Public Knowledge.The revisionism arguments generally concede that the president’s aides and campaign staff were involved in boneheaded and nefarious activities. But they contend Nixon was oblivious to much of it until after it happened. And they say the true scandal was that Nixon’s due process rights were violated by prosecutors who secretly met with judges and by the release of confidential grand jury testimony to Congress.“It sends chills down your spine about how close this is to what they’re trying to do to President Trump right now with this radical judiciary,” Bannon said on his podcast in August.Monica Crowley, a Trump administration official and former Fox News host, said on a New York Post podcast in July that “the full vindication, I think, of President Nixon is coming to pass.” She said Trump passes Nixon’s portrait every day, and she sees the two men as similarly “forging their own path, which inevitably put them in a collision course with the deep state.”Many of these conservative commentators rely on or feature Geoff Shepard, a former Nixon administration lawyer, who’s written for decades about ways he believes the president was wronged in the Watergate investigation.Bannon, who helped run Trump’s first campaign and remains a loyal booster, provided his streaming subscribers with free access this past summer to a new documentary based on Shepard’s work. In September, a historian spotted one of Shepard’s Watergate books displayed prominently at the gift shop of the National Archives, which is currently managed by the former head of the Nixon Foundation.A key piece of Shepard’s argument is that the “smoking gun” tape is misunderstood. The tape is typically interpreted as showing that Nixon approved White House interference in the FBI probe into the DNC break-in, but according to Shepard, it was actually a narrow question as to whether investigators could look into donations the Department of Justice had deemed outside of the Watergate case. In other words, he writes on his website, it “did not remotely prove that Nixon was in on, much less directing, the cover-up from its outset.”Shepard, who is also on the Nixon Foundation’s board, declined an interview request, but said in an email that his focus has always been on ways he believes the Watergate Special Prosecution Force violated the due process rights of the president and his aides.“In short, lawfare (the misuse of criminal law to undercut political opponents) didn’t begin with President Trump; it began with President Nixon,” Shepard said.Jill Wine-Banks, an assistant Watergate special prosecutor, said these arguments are nonsense. Nixon’s team distributed cash as hush money payments, the president is on tape approving it, the grand jury testimony was provided to Congress through a judicial process and there were no secret meetings with a federal judge, she said. And the smoking gun tape includes Nixon giving instructions on how to tell the FBI to avoid questioning certain people that would expose where hush money payments came from.“That’s him directing an action,” she said in an interview. “How much more do you need than that for him to be guilty of the cover-up?”The Nixon Foundation, which gave Trump an Architect of Peace Award last month, has welcomed the newfound interest in dismantling the mainstream narrative around Watergate. On social media, the organization has amplified examples of popular pundits defending Nixon. It recently published a video featuring podcast host Michael Knowles describing him as “the first president taken down by the deep state.”Speaking at the Nixon Library in Yorba Linda, California, this month, Knowles said the investigations into Trump during his first term started the process of exonerating Nixon by demonstrating “the lengths to which ‘deep state’ would go to undermine the will of the electorate.” “Was it so crazy that the man whom they dubbed ‘Tricky Dick’ might be the target of their shenanigans?” Knowles said in his speech, later adding, “The forces that sought to destroy him are the forces that threaten us again.”Knowles was unavailable for an interview. Historians, however, argue that the only person who set up Nixon was Nixon himself.Hughes, from the University of Virginia, said Nixon pursued a cover-up to protect himself because he had committed crimes to target political enemies, and it’s what makes his actions most relevant today.“What Nixon hid, Trump is doing much more blatantly,” Hughes said. “He’s weaponizing the government against people who he deems political threats, and that’s just something that America has not allowed, and something that America came together against during Watergate.”Tyler KingkadeTyler Kingkade is a national reporter for NBC News, based in Los Angeles.Ben KamisarBen Kamisar is a national political reporter for NBC News
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November 4, 2025
Savewith a NBCUniversal ProfileCreate your free profile or log in to save this articleNov. 4, 2025, 5:00 AM EST / Updated Nov. 4, 2025, 10:33 AM ESTBy Steve KornackiThe Donald Trump era has changed American politics for a decade. On Tuesday night, two contentious races for governor will define what the next steps for Republicans and Democrats might look like — not only who will lead Virginia and New Jersey for four years, but how the two parties are appealing to different types of voters and building coalitions for future elections.Republicans have gained ground in those two blue-leaning states since Trump’s heavy losses there in 2020. Tuesday’s elections will show just how durable those advances were, hinging in part on the progress the Republican Party under Trump made with groups that once voted more strongly against the GOP. That especially includes Latino voters, who banked heavily toward Trump in 2024. But Democrats have spent the last year focused on how to reverse those trends, nominating candidates without baggage from the party’s 2024 election loss. And, of course, Trump is now in the White House, which led to voter backlash against him as the incumbent during his first term.Follow live updates on the 2025 electionTune in to live NBC News election night coverage:NBC News NOW, our free streaming service, will be airing an election special beginning at 7 p.m. ET.NBCNews.com and the NBC News app will feature real-time results of all the major races as well as all the latest reporting.NBC News’ podcast, “Here’s the Scoop,” will be livestreaming on YouTube and NBCNews.com beginning around 11 p.m. ET.NBC News’ Chief Data Analyst Steve Kornacki will be at the big board all night, analyzing results and providing minute-by-minute updates exclusively on the NBC News NOW special and the “Here’s the Scoop” livestream.The two states saw similar results in the last presidential election, but the races have gone differently this year. In Virginia, Democrat Abigail Spanberger enters Election Day with a clear polling lead over Republican Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears. And in New Jersey, Democrat Mikie Sherrill holds a smaller advantage in most surveys over Republican Jack Ciattarelli. Here are the places and the trends to watch when the votes get tallied Tuesday night.NEW JERSEYBack in 2020, Joe Biden trounced Trump by 17 points in New Jersey. But Republicans have been seeing steady gains since then.In 2021, Ciattarelli came within just three points of unseating Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy. And last year, Trump lost by less than 6 points, the second-largest improvement he posted anywhere in the country. Both results were better performances — in all of the state’s 21 counties — than Trump in 2020. Crucially, the areas where Trump and Ciattarelli made their biggest strides don’t necessarily overlap. They each tapped into different voters in different places. Ciattarelli made some of his biggest gains in suburban areas with above-average median incomes and higher concentrations of college degrees. Meanwhile, Trump’s largest improvements largely came in areas with heavier Hispanic populations.Where Ciattarelli outperformed TrumpSomerset County is an affluent and historically Republican county filled with New York City bedroom communities. But like many suburban areas around the country, its population has diversified — from 75% white at the turn of the century to barely 50% in the most recent census — and its highly educated voters have reacted with hostility to the Trump-led GOP. George W. Bush carried Somerset in 2004, but Democrats have won it in every presidential election since, with Biden’s 21-point romp in 2020 as their high water mark.In 2021, Ciattarelli came within four points of Murphy — a 17-point improvement over that Trump 2020 performance. Trump didn’t give back all of those gains in 2024, but he did lose significant ground from Ciattarelli’s showing, finishing 14 points behind Kamala Harris. (It helped that Ciattarelli once represented parts of Somerset in the state Legislature.)A key question is whether Ciattarelli can at least replicate that 2021 showing. Four years ago, he benefited from the fact that Biden was in the White House. Many anti-Trump voters were willing to put aside their concerns with the national Republican Party. It turned out they had concerns with the Democrats who were running New Jersey, too, and deemed Ciattarelli an acceptable alternative. But with Trump back in power, will it be different?Within Somerset, Bernards Township (population 27,000) is a great example of these dynamics. It has a median household income that’s nearly twice the statewide average. Two-thirds of its population is white, and more than two-thirds of its white adult population have college degrees, far above the statewide level. As recently as 2012, it was still voting Republican at the presidential level, but Trump’s emergence changed that. He lost it by 14 points in 2020 and only improved a smidge in 2024, when Harris bested him by 11. Ciattarelli, on the other hand, won it by 5. Bernards Township is chock full of exactly the kind of voter Ciattarelli needs to hang on to: the avowedly anti-Trump, affluent suburbanite.Where Trump outperformed CiattarelliPassaic County in North Jersey includes the state’s third-largest city, Paterson, along with a number of densely populated middle-class suburbs and a stretch of rural land and wilderness. It is racially and ethnically diverse: a population that’s about 40% Hispanic and white, just under 10% Black and Asian, and notable Orthodox and Arab American pockets. Bill Clinton broke a string of Republican successes in Passaic when he carried it in his 1996 re-election bid and his party then posted double-digit wins until last year, when Trump flipped it. While Ciattarelli also made sizable strides in 2021, he didn’t make the kinds of inroads Trump did in the county’s largest and least white municipalities: Paterson and Passaic city. In Paterson, which is two-thirds Hispanic and less than 10% white, Ciattarelli lost by 71 points in his 2021 campaign, around what the typical margin of defeat for a Republican in the city had long been. But Trump finished only 28 points behind Harris last year. He did this by demonstrating significant new appeal in heavily Hispanic areas and by posting improvements in heavily Arab American South Paterson, where voters seemed to cast protest votes either for Trump or Green Party candidate Jill Stein. With 70,000 residents, Passaic city is about half the size of Paterson, but it’s also overwhelmingly (75%) Hispanic. In 2024, Trump carried the city by 6 points after Ciattarelli lost it by 40 in 2021.This was a trend seen across the state. Trump’s biggest gains from 2020 — and his biggest overperformances relative to Ciattarelli — tended to come from areas with sizable Hispanic populations. Ciattarelli’s inability to make even remotely similar inroads four years ago casts doubt on whether he can add these voters to his coalition this year. Certainly, his campaign hopes that Trump will serve as a gateway to the broader Republican Party for them. But it also appears that many were first-time voters or voters who don’t normally participate in non-presidential elections. If Ciattarelli can fold in some of these new Trump voters, he’ll be taking a major step toward victory. Short of winning over new votes in Paterson and Passaic city, Ciattarelli will have to hope that turnout is low. This was the case in 2021, when turnout plummeted in many heavily Democratic urban areas around the state. Take Paterson, where turnout in 2021 was just 35% of the level it had been in the 2020 presidential race — compared to the statewide average of 57%. Reasserting their dominance in cities like Paterson while also beefing up turnout is a major priority for Sherrill this year.VIRGINIAIn 2024, Trump lost Virginia by just under 6 points, an improvement from his 10-point defeat in four years earlier. In a way, the result amounted to a tale of two different elections in the same state.In the Washington, D.C., suburbs and exurbs of Northern Virginia, Trump made big strides, particularly in areas with significant Hispanic and Asian American populations. Had these gains extended across the state, he might have actually put Virginia in play, but outside of northern Virginia his progress was spotty at best, and he even backtracked in some areas.The counties and cities that comprise Northern Virginia account for about one-third of all votes statewide. The growing and diversifying populations here are the primary source of Virginia’s evolution into a blue state — but those same places also drove Trump’s Northern Virginia improvement in 2024.Building on 2021 gainsIn reducing his deficit, Trump locked in many — but not all — of the gains that Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin made in these same places in his victorious 2021 gubernatorial campaign. For example, in sprawling Loudoun County, which accounts for 5% of all votes cast statewide, Youngkin lost by 11 points in 2021, and Trump lost by 16 points last year. Both represent big jumps from Trump’s 25-point loss in 2020.Trump did this in part by building support with Latino voters, as he did nationally. Case in point: Sterling has the highest concentration of Latino residents (50%) of any census-designated place in Loudoun County. Trump lost Sterling by 19 points to Harris after getting crushed by 44 against Biden in 2020.Notably, this is one place where Trump outperformed Youngkin, who lost it by 24 in his own campaign. For Earle-Sears, building on this momentum is essential.GOP improvements in Loudoun are also rooted in local politics, especially contentious disputes over education standards and school policies over the last half-decade. In particular, gains by both Youngkin and Trump with Asian American voters seem tied to these battles.Earle-Sears is seeking to capitalize the same way. This makes majority-Asian Loudoun Valley Estates worth watching closely. A development community of about 10,000, its median income and college attainment rate are both far above the state average. In 2020, Loudoun Valley Estates sided with Biden by 43 points. Youngkin cut that to a 28-point Democratic margin a year later, and Trump brought it down five points further last year.It will be a solid barometer of whether Earle-Sears has tapped into the same currents that boosted Youngkin and Trump in Loudoun and across northern Virginia. There are similar dynamics in suburban Prince William County, another population juggernaut that accounts for 5% of all votes statewide. With a white population of around 40%, Prince William is more diverse and slightly more Democratic than Loudoun. Trump lost by 27 points there in 2020, a margin that both he and Youngkin reduced by about 10 points in 2021 and 2024.Then there’s the geographically compact city of Manassas Park, which has just over 16,000 residents, almost half of whom are Hispanic — the highest concentration of any county or independent city in Virginia. Trump cut his deficit there from 33 points in 2020 to 20 points last year.Where to watch beyond Northern VirginiaMoving away from Northern Virginia, two major population centers stand out for their willingness to embrace Youngkin — and their refusal to do the same for Trump last year.One is Chesterfield County, which takes in the suburbs to the south of Richmond. With 365,000 residents, it’s the fourth-largest county in the state, and the biggest outside of Northern Virginia.These were staunchly Republican suburbs from the end of World War II on, but a gradual shift away from the GOP exploded with the emergence of Trump. In 2016, he carried Chesterfield by 2 points, the worst showing for a Republican since Thomas Dewey in 1948. By 2020, it had flipped completely and Trump lost it by 7 points. And last year, it was the rare county in America that actually got bluer, with Harris pushing the margin to 9 points.Chesterfield is racially diverse and has one of the largest Black populations in the state. Notably, though, a precinct-level analysis finds that Trump actually improved his performance in predominantly Black parts of the county; it was in largely white and high-educated precincts that he continued to lose ground:A major reason why Youngkin is governor today is that he managed to roll back these Trump-era Democratic inroads, beating Democrat Terry McAuliffe by 5 points in Chesterfield. His campaign kept Trump at arm’s length and was no doubt helped by the fact that Trump was a former president in 2021, with the White House then occupied instead by an unpopular Democrat in Biden. Now, with polls indicating there’s been no growth in Trump’s popularity over the last year, it figures to be tougher for Earle-Sears to connect with these voters. Democrats are banking on a backlash against Trump, and Chesterfield looms as a test of whether they are right to.The biggest bellwether in the state may be the independent city of Virginia Beach, which has about 460,000 residents. For years, a large Navy presence helped make Virginia Beach one of the most Republican-friendly big cities in the country, but as it has continued to grow and diversify, it has tipped into the Democratic column. In 2020, Biden became the first Democrat since Lyndon B. Johnson to carry Virginia Beach, taking it by 5 points. Flipping it back was a priority for Republicans as they sought to make Virginia a battleground state last year, but Harris managed to hang on to it by 3 points.The story was different in the last governor’s race, though, with Youngkin winning Virginia Beach by 8 points. As with Chesterfield, the question is whether Trump’s return to the White House will make it all but impossible for the GOP to replicate that 2021 roadmap this year.Steve KornackiSteve Kornacki is the chief data analyst for NBC News.
October 9, 2025
Oct. 9, 2025, 5:00 AM EDTBy Jarrod BarryThere has rarely been a more confusing time to be a holiday shopper.Tariffs imposed by the Trump administration mean many imports are more expensive today than they were just a few months ago.The government shutdown and fresh warning signals in the labor market are contributing to anxiety about the economy.One way to relieve some of the uncertainty ahead of the holidays could be to buy your gifts early this year. And there are plenty of ways to do that as retailers kick off deals season.Amazon Prime’s Big Deal Days, Target’s Circle Week, Best Buy’s Techtober Sale and Walmart Deals are just some of the national shopping events underway in October for the pre-pre-holiday shopper. “I think the retailers are acknowledging that there is consumer demand to alleviate that stress and anxiety and shop earlier by launching events like Prime Big Deal Days in early October,” said Jack O’Leary, director of e-commerce strategic insights at NielsenIQ. To get a better sense of how prices are changing week by week, NBC News has teamed up with web data infrastructure firm Bright Data to track the online retail prices of around 600 items across Amazon, Best Buy, Home Depot, Walmart and Target.According to the latest data set, certain sectors are raising prices on more of their items than others. Shopping for gifts in October could mean significant savings over buying the same things in two months.It’s not all bad news. In a few departments, prices are rising less than you might expect, making these good options for last-minute shopping in December.ChocolateHigh cocoa prices forced candy makers like Hershey’s to charge more for nearly all of their chocolate this year.In July, the company announced that it would raise prices for retail customers by the “low double digits” percentages. “The increase we announced in July due to sustained, record high cocoa prices is it,” said a spokesperson for Hershey’s. “Implementation is about 90 days out from the announcement, so you’re likely seeing some of this starting to flow through. As a reminder, this does not impact Halloween seasonal candy.”Hershey’s also told analysts it expects that costs for raw cocoa, which have subsided a bit in recent weeks, will nonetheless remain relatively high into next year.In that environment, special deal days like the ones happening now could be a very good time to stock up on enough chocolate to get through to January. Clothes It would be reasonable to assume that apparel prices have soared this year. After all, the majority of clothes sold at U.S. retailers are manufactured overseas, many in countries that are caught up in a trade war with Washington.But that’s not what the data shows. NBC News’ tracker has picked up only a modest increase in retail prices since May. At Walmart, for example, less than 5% of the clothes we’re tracking are more expensive today than they were five months ago.If current trends hold, most T-shirts at Walmart won’t cost a lot more in December than they did in October.ToysFew places have been affected more by tariffs than the toy aisle. Last year, as many as 3 out of every 4 toys sold in the United States were manufactured in China. Since then, President Donald Trump’s tariffs on China have soared as high as 145% at the height of the trade war, before they settled at around 30%. The CEOs of rival toy giants Mattel and Hasbro both said this spring that their companies were working to diversify global manufacturing so that less than 40% of their toys come from China by the end of the year.But potentially not in time for the 2025 holiday season. Among the more than 11,000 products for sale on Amazon that Bright Data monitors, prices have increased for 37% of the sample’s Mattel toys, and 41% of its toys from Hasbro. Spokespeople for Amazon, Mattel and Hasbro didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.Jarrod BarryJarrod Barry is an intern with the NBC News Business Unit.Steve Kopack contributed.
September 22, 2025
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