Good morning. Here is today’s ramble.
And here is a transcript, edited for clarity:
Good morning. It is Friday morning, June 26th. It is 5:30 in the morning. Sun’s starting to rise here in the Hudson Valley of New York.
I want to talk today about some comments Vice President JD Vance made at the Richard Nixon Center. It’s so appropriate that he would be at the Richard Nixon Center that it’s sort of funny. The whole thing is funny. But being funny is part of the problem.
Let me just play some clips here—some of them you may have seen—but just for posterity I want to get these down, because this will not even be a twelve-hour news story.
Interviewer: That title chapter is “More Money, More Problems.” Why does more money sometimes cause more problems?
JD Vance: I’m a Millennial, so I believe that that’s the wisdom of the great Christian theologian, P. Diddy—who, as we found out in the last couple years, is very much not a Christian or a theologian. But— [laughs] See, I’m gonna get in trouble for all kinds of things; that’ll be one of them that will be an attack at some point.
That’s one. And here’s the other one, which I think has been talked about a little bit more:
So we were talking about this a little bit backstage, but I’m actually fascinated by Nixon as a character in history. I think that his historical legacy is enjoying a bit of renaissance, but I think deservingly so.
As I joked with Robert backstage, if Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be like a twelve-hour new story. The idea that it would’ve taken down a presidency is crazy.
And, by the way, if you look at the story of how the Deep State took down Richard Nixon, it’s not all that different from what the same groups of people, the same institutions, tried to do to Donald Trump in the first Trump Administration. There is a parallel.
So these are two things that JD Vance said.
What I think is offensive about them is that he’s making light of, first, the sex crimes of P. Diddy, Sean Combs, who is…maybe not quite an Epstein-level sex offender, but, you know, close. And he’s also making light of Watergate, and making that into a laugh line. I mean, you could tell when Vance was saying the Diddy jokes that he was pausing for laughs, because he knew he’d get a laugh. Like, did he write that himself? Was that scripted?
This idea of the Deep State taking down Nixon is preposterous, which we’ll get into in a second. But I think it’s emblematic of this whole period of time that we’re in, that this guy, this Millennial as he calls himself, is not a serious man in any way, shape, or form.
How unserious is he? JD Vance is so unserious that someone wrote as a joke on Twitter that he used a latex glove to fuck a couch, and people believed it enough that it’s still a thing. That’s how much of a joke this guy is.
We know he’s a a puppet of Peter Thiel, the guy who brought us Palantir and is obsessed with the Antichrist and immortality. And we’ve talked about him a lot here at PREVAIL, but Vance is a puppet of Thiel. That’s all that he is, that’s all he’ll ever be. So this whole act of his is performative bullshit, but in a different way than Trump himself does the performative bullshit. Because Vance is smart enough to know what he’s doing, for one thing. And there’s a trolling aspect of it coming from JD that is more reminiscent of Donald Trump Jr. than Donald Trump Sr.
It’s just kind of repulsive. I mean, Watergate, which happened when I was, I think, a year old, not even. It happened around the same time that the Knicks last won the title, actually. Watergate was a watershed moment in the history of this country. I mean, it really was. For whatever reasons that started it—the break-in and the Plumbers and the cover-up and the missing audio, all of that stuff—there’s so many details. A lot of the stuff remains murky to this day, which is why I think it’s just called “Watergate,” as an umbrella term for the whole thing that fell underneath it. But major changes happened politically, culturally, in the wake of Watergate. One of the things that happened is that Congress actually, you know, did something about it—which is unthinkable today.
So just a couple of points that I want to make here about the comments JD Vance made.
Starting with Diddy, the idea that this guy, JD Vance—last seen, according to that book by Haberman and Swan, in the Situation Room, leading a meeting about how to cover up his boss’s complicity in the trafficking and rape of underage girls in the Epstein Files—the idea that this guy, who has zero moral compass, just zero, who is incapable of it—the idea that JD Vance could trot up there and quote, jokingly, the words of a sex criminal on the scale of P. Diddy—I mean, it’s disgusting, and it’s also insulting—not least to all the the women who are the survivors of these monstrous crimes.
This is the guy that’s gonna be, probably, president at some point. If you go by the actuarial tables: Trump is not in good health, he is eighty years old, and we’ve got three more years of this shit. He would be replaced by a guy in JD Vance who has zero ethics at all, zero moral compass, zero self awareness or ability to read the room—although I suppose he can read the room at the Nixon Center.
So that’s the first thing.
The second thing: Watergate was about election interference, really, if you think about it. Like the idea that what they were trying to do was bug the offices of the chair of the DNC—Larry O’Brien, the proto political insider from the Democratic Party, who dreamed up a lot of the techniques still used by the party today, and ran JFK’s successful 1960 campaign against…Richard Nixon. So, not somebody Nixon likes. That was the office that they bugged. So, you know, why were they in there bugging it? Because they wanted to win the fucking election.
This is the thing that is very much at the forefront of Trump’s mind, and therefore Vance’s mind. The midterm elections—if the Democrats take the House and the Senate, there’s gonna be a lot of bad shit coming down the pike for these people. Presumably. I don’t want to guarantee it because, you know, I’ve done that before. And if you go back and read my archive of of tweets from 2018, 2019, the biggest mistake I made in those tweets was thinking that the Democrats would come after Trump and his people in a real, meaningful way, which obviously didn’t happen.
Watergate was about election interference. And here’s JD Vance joking and making light about election interference.
The next thing is that if you go back and read through the history, all the shenanigans these Plumbing guys were up to, G. Gordon Liddy and all the others, they all had these German Nazi names for the ops they were doing. So these are guys that were pretty okay with Nazis and Nazism. Not that that’s a big surprise. Just like, you know, Trump and Elon Musk, and presumably you know, Vance, since he has no moral compass and does whatever Peter Thiel says.
Watergate was also very much associated with a corrupt Attorney General—who wound up going to prison, by the way. And we’ve got that. We’ve got two. We’ve got Pam Bondi who left, and now we’ve got this Todd Blanche. And we’ll see if history repeats with these people. It’s unlikely. I think Trump will pardon both of them before he leaves, unless he dies before he can do so. Probably he already has, would be my guess.
Watergate involved rightwing Cubans. We have a major-league rightwing Cuban in the Secretary of State position right now, who is not covering himself in glory these days.
So you know, you’ve got that.
There was a whole conspiracy theory that there was a “kompromat” angle to Watergate, where they were breaking in there to find incriminating evidence of some prostitution ring that was used by members of the Democratic Party. It wound up being bullshit, probably. Although, did people in the Democratic Party frequent the sex workers’ places of employment? Probably. And probably also Republicans did too.
So you’ve got that bubbling in the background. Maybe that’s what JD Vance meant by the Deep State, right? Maybe he just meant sex workers and sex traffickers.
You’ve got a body count. You know, Nixon won the election in ‘72 overwhelmingly. And he didn’t need to be doing all this stuff—which is, to me, being a Gen Xer and not Millennial like Vance, the most perplexing thing to me about Watergate is: why did they even bother doing this? I mean, they were so far ahead in the polls and Nixon won resoundingly. Why risk everything for this? For what possible gain? That was the thing that to me always seemed puzzling and never made much sense.
But Nixon was paranoid. He was paranoid and weird and creepy and evil. And those people kind of get lost in their own minds and in their own stories that they invent for themselves. You know, kind of like Trump does now.
But Nixon had a body count. Nixon and Kissinger had a body count. Because of Vietnam and Cambodia and Laos, they had a body count. They killed a lot of people. Not just the U.S. service members who died, but also the people in Vietnam and Cambodia and Laos who they killed by extending the war.
Trump and Vance also have a body count. It’s an enormous body count, if we consider the half a million, coming up on one million people who died of starvation because of the DOGE cuts to USAID implemented by Elon Musk—if we consider that as part of Trump’s body count, and we should, it’s an enormous body count. I saw a statistic on Twitter—by 2030 Musk/Trump will be responsible for more deaths than Hitler. So, congratulations guys; good on the body count.
We still hear to this day Woodward and Bernstein—Woodward and Bernstein, obviously great investigative journalists working for the Washington Post, who broke the Watergate story and stuck with the story even when Nixon denied it and really came after them. And people hold that up—and rightly so—as an example of good journalism and the power of journalism. Absolutely so.
But—and I’ve said this a bunch of times, usually on Five 8: so many things had to go right for that story to work. You had to have the two journalists willing to do the story, one of whom, Woodward, had the really good source in Deep Throat. You had an editor that was willing to work with them and help them and guide them and believed in them and let them keep covering the story. And then you had an editor-in-chief, Ben Bradlee, who stuck by his people even at the face of great difficulty when the Nixon people came after them. And you had Kay Graham, the publisher of the Washington Post, who let Ben Bradlee do that. So you had to have all of those things in place for this to work. So even back then, Woodward and Bernstein was more of an anomaly than not.
Fast-forward to now, Woodward, Bob Woodward, one of the many, many journalists who has embraced the “I will save all the good stuff for the book, which will be out in nine months, maybe 10, at which time what I’m reporting about and what I’ve discovered will be out of date and nobody will be able to do much with it” school.
That’s the state of journalism now—everybody’s got to wait for the book. I don’t really know why that is. I mean, we’re learning a lot of great stuff now from Haberman and Swan, kudos to them. But, like, making us wait for the book is not cool, guys. It’s not cool.
And of course, now the Washington Post is not owned by Kay Graham, it’s owned by Jeff Bezos, who, you know, is in Trump’s pocket—to maybe to a slightly lesser degree than CBS News is, certainly: Bari Weiss and the Ellisons and these horrible people.
Having a legacy media outlet that’s even willing to go after the president in this way, and the way that the Post did in ‘73, is also not terribly realistic right now—which is something Vance is well aware of, as he’s making jokes about Watergate.
The Republicans in Congress fought back after Watergate. They got Nixon to resign. They made it clear they were going to impeach him. They made it clear that he was going to be convicted and and removed. And to avoid that ignominy, he resigned. Nixon resigned. He left office. “I’m not a crook. I’m…I’m not a crook.” He was a crook, and he left.
Trump doesn’t have that shame factor, so he will never leave willingly. I’ve long said, even if he was impeached and they said he had to go, I don’t think he would go. I think he would just hole up in his bunker or whatever and refuse to leave. But we’re never gonna find that out, because Congress is full of these disgustingly craven poltroons who just, you know, they can’t get out of their own way. They’re beholden either to the donors or to fear, or to, you know, internal party bullshit politics. I don’t know.
But there’s no way that that we could depend on any of these people, including a lot of Democrats, to do the right thing. And we’re seeing this now. We’re seeing this now here, even in blue New York. One of our senators here in New York is the Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, who is, I think, way more concerned with Israel right now than he’s concerned with the United States.
And then the other senator, Gillibrand, is too busy sucking up to the crypto boys; she wanted to make sure her son had nice venture capital coming his way, didn’t want to disrupt his big business operation that’s being launched. This is a kid who just graduated from Stanford and raised $30 million in venture funding, for some app that may or may not be good. But the idea that he would have gotten the venture funding if he wasn’t the son of this prominent U.S. senator is probably far-fetched.
Anyway, it’s just everybody in Congress is too concerned with their own shit. And at some point, money, currency, has no value. A dollar, a $20 bill, a $100 bill, has no inherent value. There’s nothing valuable about it, other than the fact that we all believe it’s valuable. And when we stop believing that it’s valuable, it just becomes paper. And I think if it’s a crypto wallet printout, that’s even less likely to hold someone’s faith.
That’s what these people are toying with right now, as JD Vance jokes that Nixon is making a comeback. I don’t know. I like to think that Nixon would not like what’s happening now. I like to think that he would look at especially the way that Trump is completely capitulating to the Russians, to the Iranians, and likely also to the Chinese, and just shake his head and be like, “I don’t like this guy.”
We’ll never know that either, of course. But in the meantime, you know, it’s funny to laugh at JD Vance and call him a couchfucker, and I do it all the time to preserve my sanity. But the reality is that he is a puppet of Peter Thiel, who is very Nazi adjacent. Vance has zero moral compass. He is so in the bag for the regime that he’s down in the Situation Room trying to make sure that the Epstein Files do not ever see the light of day, because he knows what his boss did, probably, or suspects what his boss did is so bad that it would just take him down.
And if he becomes president, as I said before they even picked JD Vance, out on the road with Allison Gill and LB, what, two years ago, two summers ago, I guess it was. JD Vance is a fascist, man. He’s a big player in the Dark Enlightenment. He really does believe, insofar as he believes anything, that democracy is lame and that, you know, this other way is the way. So if and when he becomes president, it’s gonna be a big, big problem.
Trump is horrible in his own way, for sure, obviously. But what I’ve seen, based on the Iran stuff, is that he’s not Hitler bad; he’s only mobster bad. Not that he isn’t doing Hitler things, and not that we should breathe a sigh of relief, but I think Trump is concerned with just getting his cut and his taste of all the corrupt money shit going on, the little schemes here and there—that’s his number one priority. He’s not concerned with ruling over people in the way that Hitler was. I think that he sees the concentration camps, for example, more as a boondoggle and a way to funnel money to his cronies. He doesn’t really care about whether they’re ever completed or any of that stuff. I think that the the prime movers of all of these things are other people who have enormous power in his administration—and Vance may well be one of them. You know, Russ Vougt, and Stephen Miller certainly—those guys are definitely real fascists, and they’re dangerous.
And when Trump goes, maybe some of the corruption, the obvious stealing and plunder, will be a little bit less. But the fascism is going to be more. And the fascism, the Nazism, the citizens turning on citizens…that’s going to be what gets us.
These are bleak thoughts—but Watergate is no laughing matter.
But we have to remember, just to end it on an “up” note, that the person who was the chair of the DNC, Larry O’Brien, whose office the Plumbers broke into during Watergate, went on to become the commissioner of the NBA. And the trophy that Jalen Brunson is shown holding here is in fact the Larry O’Brien Trophy. So, I don’t know. All’s well that ends well, I guess?
I felt that way about the Knicks, and I feel that way about us as a people: We shall prevail.
TONIGHT
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Photo of Brunson by Newsday.
