During a segment on HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher” in August, activist Christopher Rufo astonished the studio audience when he said the Watergate scandal that toppled President Richard Nixon “was a setup from start to finish.”

The crowd hooted. Maher retorted that there were plenty of “smoking guns” showing the late president’s guilt. But Rufo insisted that there were federal agencies that had had illegal backdoor meetings and that there was a judge who was “out to get Nixon.”

Maher muttered, “Oh, geez,” to which Rufo replied with a grin and a prediction: “Nixon vindication by 2035.”

The Watergate scandal has long been viewed as a defining moment in presidential corruption and accountability, prompting a series of government transparency reforms and influencing generations of journalists. It became a shorthand comparison for political scandal and lent the omnipresent “-gate” suffix to many that followed.

But those lessons are now being flipped by some of the most influential right-wing figures, including people known to have President Donald Trump’s ear, who insist that Watergate was actually an underhanded scheme by the “deep state” and the press to take down a popular Republican president.

Watergate has often been invoked in comparison to Trump’s scandals, in both his first and current term. Many people — from historians to former Nixon officials — argue that were Watergate to happen in today’s media landscape, with the influence of conservative outlets and in particular Fox News, Nixon most likely would have survived it.

“In some ways, the reframing of Watergate seems like an attempt to try and rehabilitate the current president’s image,” said Brendan Gillis, director of teaching and learning initiatives at the American Historical Association, a nonprofit professional organization. “In a lot of ways, it’s about what’s happened the last few years.”

Michael Koncewicz, a historian who has been sounding the alarm on Watergate revisionism and who formerly worked at the Nixon presidential library, said the scandal has always been remembered as one in which “the system worked.” But if these pundits “can make Americans believe that that story is bulls—,” he said, “then they can ensure that another Watergate will never happen again.”

Beyond Rufo, the conservative media personalities Tucker Carlson, Michael Knowles and Steve Bannon have pushed this revisionist Watergate narrative in the past year. Hillsdale College, a conservative college in Michigan, promoted and endorsed a Carlson podcast episode that described Watergate as a “scam.” Even actor Bill Murray suggested this year on Joe Rogan’s podcast that Nixon might have been “framed.”

Republican-controlled states like Idaho and Louisiana have approved a video for use in public school social studies classes that was produced by the conservative media organization PragerU, in which the conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt quotes a historian who argues that Watergate was the media’s attempt to reverse an election.

Hewitt, who serves on the board of the Nixon Foundation, contends that the media and the “East Coast liberal elite” had it out for Nixon in part because of his “staunch anti-communist” views.

PragerU worked over the past two years with many Republican-led states to get its content into public schools, and it recently partnered with the Trump administration on a civics education initiative. After Rufo’s proclamation on HBO, Marissa Streit, PragerU’s CEO, said he is “right about Nixon!” and directed people to watch Hewitt’s video on X.

Through a spokesperson, Streit declined an interview request. In response to specific questions, PragerU said people should watch its Watergate content.

Rufo also declined an interview request, but said in an email that the Nixon era is crucial to understanding why he believes politics has been in a loop since 1968.

“To understand our moment — and to move beyond it — we must understand Nixon and learn from his experience, his successes, and his failures. BLM, Russiagate, gender ideology, left-wing terrorism: all of our current challenges can be understood through the prism,” Rufo said, of Nixon, “one of the twentieth century’s greatest presidents.”

Hillsdale College, Hewitt and Idaho and Louisiana’s education agencies did not respond to requests for comment, nor did Carlson and Bannon’s shows.

Kenneth Hughes Jr., a researcher at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, who is considered one of the foremost experts on the audiotapes from Nixon’s White House, said the recordings clearly demonstrate that Nixon was “the ring leader of the abuses of power that we group under the heading of Watergate.”

“They do show Nixon deliberately, consciously and illegally weaponizing the government against those he considered political threats,” Hughes said.

Nixon has always been a conflicted character in American consciousness. His congressional career defined him as a strident anti-communist, but as president he opened diplomacy with China. Liberals have praised him for signing Title IX and the Environmental Protection Agency into law but criticized his administration for launching a “war on drugs.”

After losing the 1960 presidential election and the 1962 California gubernatorial race, Nixon famously told reporters that they “won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore,” only to then become president in 1968 and subsequently win every state except for Massachusetts and the District of Columbia in his 1972 re-election.

The scandal that brought down Nixon, in oversimplified terms, centered around his complicity in attempts to cover up the involvement of members in his administration in a botched break-in to bug the Democratic Party’s headquarters. The fallout from the episode then exposed other illegal activity he authorized to go after political enemies.

While the twists and turns were widely covered by multiple national media at the time, the scandal was immortalized by the book and film “All the President’s Men,” based on the work of Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein — relying in part on an anonymous source known as “Deep Throat” — to expose the plot.

Nixon resigned in August 1974, once it became clear he’d lost the support of many Republicans in Congress and would likely face impeachment.

“If Donald Trump and his advisors and his supporters, in the media and within his administration, can alter the history of Watergate, then they can pretty much change anything, and that’s why the history of Watergate matters so much,” said Koncewicz, associate director of New York University’s Institute for Public Knowledge.

The revisionism arguments generally concede that the president’s aides and campaign staff were involved in boneheaded and nefarious activities. But they contend Nixon was oblivious to much of it until after it happened. And they say the true scandal was that Nixon’s due process rights were violated by prosecutors who secretly met with judges and by the release of confidential grand jury testimony to Congress.

“It sends chills down your spine about how close this is to what they’re trying to do to President Trump right now with this radical judiciary,” Bannon said on his podcast in August.

Monica Crowley, a Trump administration official and former Fox News host, said on a New York Post podcast in July that “the full vindication, I think, of President Nixon is coming to pass.” She said Trump passes Nixon’s portrait every day, and she sees the two men as similarly “forging their own path, which inevitably put them in a collision course with the deep state.”

Many of these conservative commentators rely on or feature Geoff Shepard, a former Nixon administration lawyer, who’s written for decades about ways he believes the president was wronged in the Watergate investigation.

Bannon, who helped run Trump’s first campaign and remains a loyal booster, provided his streaming subscribers with free access this past summer to a new documentary based on Shepard’s work. In September, a historian spotted one of Shepard’s Watergate books displayed prominently at the gift shop of the National Archives, which is currently managed by the former head of the Nixon Foundation.

A key piece of Shepard’s argument is that the “smoking gun” tape is misunderstood. The tape is typically interpreted as showing that Nixon approved White House interference in the FBI probe into the DNC break-in, but according to Shepard, it was actually a narrow question as to whether investigators could look into donations the Department of Justice had deemed outside of the Watergate case. In other words, he writes on his website, it “did not remotely prove that Nixon was in on, much less directing, the cover-up from its outset.”

Shepard, who is also on the Nixon Foundation’s board, declined an interview request, but said in an email that his focus has always been on ways he believes the Watergate Special Prosecution Force violated the due process rights of the president and his aides.

“In short, lawfare (the misuse of criminal law to undercut political opponents) didn’t begin with President Trump; it began with President Nixon,” Shepard said.

Jill Wine-Banks, an assistant Watergate special prosecutor, said these arguments are nonsense. Nixon’s team distributed cash as hush money payments, the president is on tape approving it, the grand jury testimony was provided to Congress through a judicial process and there were no secret meetings with a federal judge, she said. And the smoking gun tape includes Nixon giving instructions on how to tell the FBI to avoid questioning certain people that would expose where hush money payments came from.

“That’s him directing an action,” she said in an interview. “How much more do you need than that for him to be guilty of the cover-up?”

The Nixon Foundation, which gave Trump an Architect of Peace Award last month, has welcomed the newfound interest in dismantling the mainstream narrative around Watergate. On social media, the organization has amplified examples of popular pundits defending Nixon. It recently published a video featuring podcast host Michael Knowles describing him as “the first president taken down by the deep state.”

Speaking at the Nixon Library in Yorba Linda, California, this month, Knowles said the investigations into Trump during his first term started the process of exonerating Nixon by demonstrating “the lengths to which ‘deep state’ would go to undermine the will of the electorate.”

“Was it so crazy that the man whom they dubbed ‘Tricky Dick’ might be the target of their shenanigans?” Knowles said in his speech, later adding, “The forces that sought to destroy him are the forces that threaten us again.”

Knowles was unavailable for an interview.

Historians, however, argue that the only person who set up Nixon was Nixon himself.

Hughes, from the University of Virginia, said Nixon pursued a cover-up to protect himself because he had committed crimes to target political enemies, and it’s what makes his actions most relevant today.

“What Nixon hid, Trump is doing much more blatantly,” Hughes said. “He’s weaponizing the government against people who he deems political threats, and that’s just something that America has not allowed, and something that America came together against during Watergate.”