When JD Vance spoke at the Richard M Nixon presidential library last week about his new book on his journey from atheism to an allegedly devout Catholicism, he raised eyebrows by minimizing Watergate. “The idea that it [took] down a presidency is crazy,” he said. He said it was the “deep state that took down Richard Nixon”– not the 37th president’s implication in serious crimes.

Commentators were shocked. Did the vice-president not know that the investigation proved Nixon directed a conspiracy to bribe the men who broke into the Democratic party headquarters to lie in court from a secret, illegal slush fund?

That, when the president’s lawyer John Dean tried to warn him away from the attempt by suggesting it would take a million dollars that they would have to launder – “this is the sort of thing mafia people can do” – Nixon reassured him that the mafia had nothing on him: “You could get it in cash. I know where it could be gotten.”

Vance’s blithe avowal was said by commenters in my country to represent a new low in Republican cynicism. Was this the sort of thing they now think presidents should get away with?

My fellow Americans: you have memories like goldfish. Republicans have always said that – ever since Nixon’s first speech on Watergate in April 1973 about the botched burglary that set the scandal in motion 10 months earlier, when a prominent ally said it was just a prank at a press conference the next day, that the break-in was part of the “usual atmosphere of campaigning”, and the culprits were “not criminals at heart”.

That Republican ally was the governor of California, Ronald Reagan, speaking at a reception for visiting group of students. The media mocked him. The New York Times columnist Tom Wicker was enraged at how an “exponent of law and order” had surrendered to the philosophy that........

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