Watergate Shmawtergate June 29, 2026June 29, 2026 But first . . . SLTB: “Senator Rodger Marshall, up for re-election in Kansas [an obstetrician who has voted consistently against women’s reproductive rights], was on “Meet the Press” Sunday. Despite his being a highly educated doctor, I never saw anyone (other than Trump) lie so blatantly to the national press and get away with most of it. He said Trump was the first person to get Iran to sign a document that they wouldn’t pursue a nuclear bomb. This statement was so obviously false and wasn’t challenged by the moderator. The JCPOA under Obama did this and way more (inspections and removal of all enriched uranium as well as giving up their centrifuges). Every Dem needs to call this guy out.” → Better still: every Dem needs to send Pastor Adam Hamilton $25 and we’ll win! And now . . . I am definitely not the first to remark on this — it’s a month old — but it’s worth amplifying. JD Vance thinks Watergate was trivial. (For some reason, YouTube cuts off before the good news, below.) . . . In trying to romanticize Richard Nixon’s corruption, J.D. Vance took it further, making the strongest case yet for just how far America’s standards for presidential misconduct have fallen. He was asking Americans to view Watergate, once considered the defining presidential scandal in modern history, as something so insignificant by today’s standards that it would barely survive a single news cycle. . . . And that’s the part he didn’t realize he was admitting. Because if Watergate would barely make the news today, then what he’s really saying is that the scandals surrounding Donald Trump have become so much larger, so much more constant, and so all-consuming that the crime which once brought down a president would now barely interrupt the news cycle. Nixon’s corruption didn’t become smaller. Our tolerance for presidential corruption became much larger because Donald Trump keeps pushing the boundaries of what Americans are expected to accept. . . . She goes on to say: What the Vice President said was an accidental confession about just how dramatically the standards of American democracy have eroded. And it goes deeper than just that one moment. Because what J.D. Vance said wasn’t an isolated slip. It reflects a broader strategy this administration has been pursuing for months. They are choosing their words carefully, not to elevate our politics, but to lower the standards of what Americans are expected to tolerate. If you can normalize the language, you can normalize the behavior that follows. For example: The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool has been a disaster for the president. . . . [T]he administration did not take responsibility for the botched project that it had commissioned, overseen, and accelerated. Instead, Donald Trump is continuing to claim, without evidence, that vandals had slashed the pool’s lining and poured chemicals into the water. . . . National Guard members were deployed to the site, approaching visitors to remind them not to touch the water, or they could be arrested. . . . [I]nstead of admitting the failure, they arrested people who touched the pool. This is how authoritarian normalization works, and it never happens all at once. You test the language first. You see if anyone stops you. Nobody does. You escalate the language. A cabinet secretary says “libtards” on a government stage. Nobody stops you. You test the action. You arrest citizens for touching the evidence of your own failure. Nobody stops you. And then you rehabilitate historical corruption itself. A vice president sitting in a presidential library and tells America that the scandal that once brought down a president wouldn’t even last in the news cycle very long. Each one of these, taken on its own, can be dismissed as a gaffe, a joke, an overreaction, another Trump thing. But taken together, they are rehearsals. They are an administration testing the limits of what Americans will tolerate, and every test that passes without consequence gives permission for the next one. We are now less than five months from the midterm elections. Every one of these tests is calibrated toward November. The language is designed to dehumanize the opposition before voters go to the polls. The arrests are designed to intimidate. And the Nixon rehabilitation is designed to tell Americans that the corruption they’ve already witnessed doesn’t matter, has never mattered, and should never have been grounds for accountability in the first place. The message Vance delivered today from that cream-colored chair, whether he understood it or not, was simple: stop expecting consequences. And now the good news! In December 2025, Donald Trump filed a $10 billion defamation lawsuit against the BBC over a Panorama documentary called “Trump: A Second Chance?” The documentary edited together portions of Trump’s January 6 speech in a way that made it appear he had urged supporters to march with him and “fight like hell” before they attacked the Capitol. The BBC has apologized for the misleading edit but has argued there is no basis for a defamation claim and is fighting to have the lawsuit dismissed. Trump filed the lawsuit because he could not tolerate being embarrassed by a British documentary that most Americans never even saw. And now that lawsuit is becoming something Donald Trump never anticipated. In a new legal filing reviewed by Newsweek and reported today, Trump’s own attorneys are complaining that the BBC is “attempting to use this action as a vehicle to conduct a trial as to the events that occurred on January 6th.” The BBC’s lawyers have requested through discovery Trump’s telephone logs, his calendars, his schedules, and his daily diaries from November 3, 2020, to January 20, 2021. They have requested documents related to the “Stop the Steal” rally and Trump’s communications with key advisers, including Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller, and Rudy Giuliani. They have formally subpoenaed the Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust, managed by Donald Trump Jr., which holds the president’s business interests and assets. Trump’s attorneys are calling these requests “drastically far afield from the issues in this action.” The case is currently set to go to trial in February 2027. Jack Smith’s prosecution was shut down. The congressional January 6 investigation was completed, but its consequences were blunted by sweeping pardons. The January 6 accountability that so many Americans wanted disappeared when he was re-elected. And then Donald Trump, because his ego would not allow him to let a British documentary go unanswered, filed a lawsuit and handed the BBC’s lawyers the legal standing to demand every record of what he did between Election Day 2020 and Inauguration Day 2021. He opened the door himself. And now he is complaining that the BBC walked through it. Nobody forced him to do this. This is not a prosecution. This is not a congressional subpoena. This is a lawsuit that Donald Trump chose to file in a court he chose because he wanted $10 billion from a public broadcaster. And the legal process he set in motion is now demanding exactly the kind of evidence that brought down Richard Nixon: the phone logs, the schedules, the communications, the minute-by-minute record of what the president was doing while the Capitol was under attack. Nixon had the tapes. Donald Trump may end up producing his own. Whether this case goes to trial in February or settles before it gets there, the discovery requests alone have already told us something important. The legal architecture of accountability is still functioning, even when it looks like it’s been dismantled. The truth has a way of surfacing, even when powerful people spend years trying to bury it. Nixon learned that lesson. And J.D. Vance, sitting in Nixon’s Presidential Library, accidentally told us that this administration knows it too. Their entire strategy, the language, the arrests, the rehabilitation of Nixon’s legacy, all of it is designed to convince Americans that the truth no longer matters. But a courtroom in Florida, powered by a lawsuit that Donald Trump filed with his own hand, is quietly proving them wrong. The one thing this administration cannot control, no matter how many words they manufacture or how many people they arrest for touching peeling paint, is the truth. The truth does not disappear because they rewrite the narrative. And consequences do not disappear because they stop believing in them. Consequences have a way of catching up to those who spend their lives convinced they are untouchable. They are patient. They are relentless. And for some of the people responsible for bringing us to this moment, they are already beginning to arrive in the very courtrooms Donald Trump helped build for himself. That is why I still have hope for America. And you should, too. EPSTEIN Any news? Trump still defying the law Congress passed one vote shy of unanimously? Alleged child rape something MAGA can overlook because prices have come down and he ended Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on Day One?