The Nixon Foundation’s new videos make Nixon seem … sexy? Pictured: BIA and EsDeeKid Arnold Sachs/Keystone/CNP/Getty Images; Frazer Harrison/Getty Images; John Nacion/WireImage Logo text He’s tanned, rested and ready — and he’s been dead for 32 years.
Amazingly, Richard Nixon, the most nefarious American political personality of the 1970s, appears to be making a comeback, at least online. It’s being called Nixonmaxxing, and it involves a series of slickly edited social media videos that cut archival Nixon footage to rap tracks and turn the 37th president into the sort of stone-cold, sigma male-style antihero that Gen Z bros can’t get enough of these days.
As it turns out, the videos are the work of the Richard Nixon Foundation, a Yorba Linda, California-based nonprofit founded in 1983 — by Nixon himself — that has long been dedicated to protecting Tricky Dick’s public image. Which they’ve now apparently decided should look something like Walton Goggins in a Tarantino pic.
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Of course, Nixon has never fully disappeared from the pop culture ether. Over the decades, he’s popped up as a head-in-a-bottle on Futurama, had a whole story arc on HBO’s Watchmen, appeared on rubber masks during a bank robbery in Point Break and most recently turned up in Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day, where he’s shown giving a tour of dead alien bodies at a secret government base — a nod to a bonkers bit of UFO lore in which Nixon supposedly took his golfing pal Jackie Gleason to an Air Force base in Florida to show off top secret E.T. corpses.
Still, let’s make one thing perfectly clear: The Nixon Foundation videos — which include snippets of EsDeeKid’s “Rottweiler” and BIA’s “We on Go,” as well as a clip of Mad Men’s Don Draper throwing his support behind RMN (“Kennedy? I see a silver spoon. Nixon? I see myself”) — are a whole other thing, more posthumous political rehabilitation than nose-tweaking satire. And they appear to be working: The foundation’s Insta account has 107,000 followers, while its most popular video has 1.4 million views.
As for who’s behind the audacious social campaign? The foundation credits its marketing team for “meeting new audiences where they are” — but it’s also known that its 33-year-old CEO, Jim Byron, who started at the organization as a 14-year-old marketing intern, is back at the job after taking 14 months off to serve as President Trump’s guy at the National Archives. We’re going to guess he’s the one to blame, or credit, depending on whether you agree with Don Draper or not.
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This story appeared in the June 16 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
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