Read a comparison between Presidents Donald Trump and Richard Nixon, and more often than not, it begins and ends with scandal, abuse of power, and corruption.

The term “Watergate” is synonymous with all of that, and people often use it to draw a direct line between Nixon-era abuses of power and those of today. But those parallels obscure a more consequential comparison for conservatives, but not necessarily the Republican Party: The connection between Trump and Nixon is not in temperament or misconduct, but in how each understood the role of government in shaping economic outcomes.

This comparison is instructive precisely because it cuts against modern assumptions about Republican economic policy.

Richard Nixon governed a Republican Party that looked very different from the one Americans associate with conservatism today. Economic debates inside the GOP had not yet hardened into doctrine, and the postwar consensus that the government had a legitimate role in managing economic stability remained largely intact. Skepticism of federal power existed, but primarily among activists and grassroots organizations, as well as publications such as National Review. However, it had not yet become a fundamental principle for the GOP.

That context matters because it explains how Nixon governed while in office. By the early 1970s, the United States was facing rising inflation, slower growth, and mounting pressure on the postwar Bretton Woods monetary system, also known as the “gold standard.” Nixon viewed those pressures not as problems that would eventually work themselves out through market forces, but as political and economic threats that required direct government action.

In 1971, he enacted a nationwide 90-day wage and price freeze, followed by a system of ongoing controls administered by federal boards. This was not a small intervention. It was the federal government directly setting wages and prices across the economy, something that would later become politically untenable within the Republican Party. The policy was intended to thwart inflation and stabilize the economy, but it also marked one of the most direct assertions of federal control over prices and wages in modern American history.

Nixon’s trade policy followed a similar logic. That same year, he imposed a temporary import surcharge, or tariff, as part of a broader effort to protect domestic industries and address balance-of-payments pressures tied to the unraveling of the Bretton Woods system. The policy’s structure differed from later tariff implementations in that it was temporary, but the approach remained the same. Market outcomes were not treated as hands-off — they were subject to government action when economic or political conditions demanded it.

Nixon’s comfort with using government for economic purposes extended beyond prices and trade. Rather than dismantling the New Deal or the Great Society, he consolidated and expanded parts of it. He........

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