Last month at the Midterm Republican Convention, Donald Trump asked the crowd to pledge allegiance to “the greatest president in the history of the United States.” He of course meant him. Trump looks down on all his predecessors as imperfect aspirants to the magnificent leadership he alone exemplifies. He occasionally praises a few of them, notably Andrew Jackson, for his truculent personality and hatred of enemies domestic or foreign, and to William McKinley, for his protectionist and imperialist policies. But otherwise, Trump generally believes that his face definitely belongs on Mount Rushmore.

Among his followers, however, there is one past president who commands a special reverence: Richard Nixon — the president who declared “I am not a crook” but was ultimately forced to resign in disgrace and probably only escaped prison because his hand-picked successor pardoned him.

At least one Trump protege, Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, has written at length about his admiration for Nixon’s foreign policy accomplishments. But he wasn’t talking about Nixon’s detente with the Soviet Union or his breakthrough in relations with the People’s Republic of China. Ramaswamy instead hailed Nixon’s “realism,” and somehow imagined that his alleged America First principles forged (ephemeral) peace to the Middle East and “got us out of Vietnam” (after Nixon violently fought and even expanded the war for the first five years of his presidency).

More typical of MAGA sentiment towards Nixon is Manhattan Institute culture-warrior Christopher Rufo, who a few years ago in City Journal relished the 37th president’s hatred of liberal elites and willingness to take on the bureaucratic Deep State:

As the radical left-wing........

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