当《华尔街日报》首次报道称唐纳德·特朗普的司法部正在重新评估水门事件调查中检察官的工作时，那些真正了解水门事件历史以及亲身经历过这段历史的人感到难以置信和愤怒。正如我的同事史蒂夫·贝嫩（Steve Benen）所说，认为[理查德]·尼克松是被密谋反对他的邪恶政府内部人士打倒的，这种想法简直是疯了。
When The Wall Street Journal first reported that Donald Trump’s Justice Department is re-evaluating the work of prosecutors in the Watergate investigation, the news was met with incredulity and outrage by those who actually know the history of Watergate — and those lived it. As my colleague Steve Benen put it [I]t’s bonkers to think [Richard] Nixon was brought down by nefarious government insiders who plotted against him.
毕竟，我们都听过录音。尼克松选择参与系统性的滥用权力。他的罪行是他自己的，而不是“深层政府”的错。这并非特朗普政府首次试图修正对尼克松的评价。事实上，如今右翼阵营中有一个专门致力于为主这位前共和党总统恢复名誉的小型产业。但这里发生的不仅仅是为另一位共和党总统挽回声誉。
We have, after all, heard the tapes. Nixon chose to engage in systemic abuses. His crimes were his own, not the fault of “the deep state.”This is not the Trump administration’s first effort at Nixon revisionism Indeed, there is a whole cottage industry on the right these days devoted to rehabilitating the former Republican president. But there is more happening here than just redeeming the reputation of a fellow Republican president.
将水门事件的故事颠倒黑白，无疑会给现任总统带来一些直接的好处。一方面，如果司法部此前蓄意破坏一位共和党总统，那将为特朗普的受害者说提供可信度；另一方面，如果尼克松实际上并没有做错任何事，那么在水门事件之后颁布的完善政府治理的改革措施就变得没有必要了——这就为主管部门持续削弱这些改革提供了正当理由。
Turning the story of Watergate on its head certainly offers some direct benefits to the current president. For one thing, if the Justice Department previously was bent on undermining a GOP president, that would lend credence to Trump’s claims of victimhood For another, if Nixon didn’t actually do anything wrong, then the good-government reforms enacted in the wake of Watergate would be unnecessary — justifying the Trump administration’s ongoing gutting of those reforms.
但白宫对水门事件的历史修正主义可能带来的最有害影响，是它威胁要颠覆我们对美国本身的集体认知。特朗普的第二个任期始终伴随着一种重塑美国历史的执念。他与史密森学会为敌；他已指示国家公园移除他认为带有贬损意味的历史标识；他还在向中小学和大学施压，要求修改课程。历史修正主义正是威权政治的核心。
But the most pernicious effect of the White House’s Watergate revisionism could be the way it threatens to upend our collective sense of America itself. Trump’s second term has been marked by an obsession with recasting American history. He is at war with the Smithsonian; he has directed the country’s national parks to remove historical signage he deems disparaging; he is pressuring schools and universities to alter their curricula Historical revisionism is central to authoritarian politics.
看看弗拉基米尔·普京就知道了：随着他在乌克兰战争期间，俄罗斯政府日益变得专制，他及其盟友不断美化苏联时期那些充满杀戮与压迫的政权，同时还将记录真实历史的人定为罪犯。
Just look at Vladimir Putin: As his Russian government has become steadily more tyrannical amid his war on Ukraine, he and his allies have glorified the murderous and repressive regimes of the Soviet era — while criminalizing those who record the true history.
当然，在水门事件上，一直都有为尼克松辩护的人。但尼克松确实犯下了导致其辞职的罪行，这一点几乎已成为美国历史中无可争议的事实。为何要针对我们集体历史认知中的这一根基发起攻击？
When it comes to Watergate, of course, there have always been Nixon apologists. But it is as close to a settled fact of American history as it gets that Nixon was guilty of the transgressions that led to his resignation. Why take aim at this foundational plank of our collective historical understanding?
这让我想起普利策奖得主、记者兼历史学家安妮·阿普尔鲍姆在2024年秋季《雷切尔·马多秀》节目中的一番话。当时雷切尔问她，为何在特朗普-万斯竞选团队周围，会出现如此多令人不安的纳粹大屠杀否定论者和二战历史修正主义者：“我们是一个历史非常复杂的国家。人们在不同问题上会站在不同立场。但我们为数不多达成共识的事情之一，就是我们在第二次世界大战中站在了正确的一边。这既是20世纪下半叶，也是当前世纪上半叶美国身份认同的重要组成部分。如果你动摇了这一点，你就剥夺了……我们真正共同拥有的少数共识之一。我认为这是蓄意为之。”
I am reminded of something the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and historian Anne Applebaum said on “The Rachel Maddow Show” in the fall of 2024, when Rachel asked her about the disturbing prevalence of Holocaust deniers World War II revisionists in the orbit of the Trump-Vance campaign: We’re a country that has a very complicated history. People take different sides on different issues. One of the few things we’ve agreed on is that we were on the right side in the Second World War.
如果你……摧毁了一个国家对其自身身份的认知，如果你让人们开始怀疑制度、历史以及他们一直以来所信仰的一切——比如，丘吉尔到底是不是我们的朋友？那么，你就正在为一个截然不同的国家铺平道路，而我认为，特朗普身边确实有人希望看到这样的结果。
It’s one of the things that defines America in the second half of the 20th century and the first half of the current century. If you undermine that, you take away … one of the few things that we really all have in common, and I think that’s deliberate. If you … destroy [a country’s] sense of what it is, if you make people doubt the system, the history, everything they’ve always believed in — you know, was Churchill even our friend?
副总统JD·范斯的好朋友塔克·卡尔森持续鼓吹我们在第二次世界大战中站错了队。就在上周，他还在强调这一点：在一个我们已不再确定那场战争是否正确、奴隶制是否邪恶，或者尼克松是否做过错事的美利坚，无疑会是一个“截然不同”的国家。这正是特朗普想要领导的国家类型——也是他想要我们相信我们始终以来的国家类型。
Then you prepare the country for something very radically different, and I think there are people around Trump who want that. Vice President JD Vance’s good friend Tucker Carlson continues to push the idea that we were on the wrong side of World War II, as recently as last week An America in which we are no longer sure if that war was right, or if slavery was bad or whether Nixon did anything wrong, certainly would be something “radically different.”It would be the kind of country Trump wants to lead — and the kind of country he wants us to believe we’ve always been. The post Watergate revisionism is Trump’s latest attempt to turn history upside down MS NOW