Gen Z is getting hyped up by the most unlikely of California locations

Thanks to a viral marketing campaign based out of California called “Nixonmaxxing,” former President Richard Nixon is cool now — and surprisingly, that might actually be a good thing. 

Look, let’s be real — it is totally bizarre that the president who gave us the Watergate scandal and notoriously resigned in disgrace is suddenly the toast of Instagram.

But — in this age of social media brainrot — if young people find themselves inspired to learn more about history and all its tangled complexities, then I’m all for it.

To return to square one — Richard Nixon was never cool, not even when he was president.

He was so uncool, during the first televised presidential debate in 1960 with JFK, that his sweaty mug famously lost him the razor-thin election. 

After he lost the 1962 California gubernatorial race, seemingly dooming his political career, he said, “You won’t have old Nixon to kick around anymore.”

Eeyore much?

Now Nixon has the kicks. Or as the young people say, “aura.” 

“Tricky Dick” is making inroads with Gen Z through wildly popular videos of the 37th president’s speeches set to hip hop tracks — and a sick merch game. 

This is “Nixonmaxxing.” 

It’s an ingenious marketing campaign by the Nixon Foundation, the Yorba Linda, California-based nonprofit that jointly administers the Nixon Library and Museum alongside the National Archives and Records Administration, the federal agency that operates most presidential libraries.

The vanguard of the campaign is a souvenir ballcap labeled with the chin-scratching term, which plays into the “looksmaxxing” trend. 

(The hat has sold out multiple times). 

And their account’s top video has cracked 1.4 million views. 

Even Vice President JD Vance has wanted in on the Nixon action. In a July visit to the library, he suggested Dick’s legacy was experiencing a “renaissance.”

The allure of Nixonmaxxing spoke to me on a different level. 

I had long been interested in how presidential libraries act as rehabilitation projects for a president’s legacy, often to a fault. 

In 2022, I visited the Truman Library and was perplexed by the museum’s equivocation when it tried to explain why Truman decided to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, effectively copping out by suggesting, well, it wasn’t really his decision at all. 

The Nixon Library suffers from some of the same evasions. The museum’s opening video almost entirely omits Watergate.

Instead, it emphasizes Nixon’s accomplishments that many Americans, progressives included, would cite as positive developments.

He founded the Environmental Protection Agency — and the Endangered Species Act — at the height of the environmental movement.

He signed Title IX to promote equality for women in high school and college sports. 

He helped desegregate schools in the South that had thus far resisted the 1954 ruling of Brown v. Board of Education. 

He returned Blue Lake, a sacred place in New Mexico to the Taos Native Americans, to the Taos Pueblo’s tribal jurisdiction.

He opened diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China, which definitely changed the world, for better or worse. 

But the Vietnam War? That wasn’t his fault. That was LBJ’s. 

Yeah, uh-huh, sure. 

Nixon definitely had a hand — and made key decisions — in Vietnam.

Real history is messy and doesn’t conform to one narrow narrative. The deeper you look, the more you find out that people were complicated.

And the times they lived in — they were as confusing and complicated as the times we live in now. 

So even though I can’t get down with treating Nixon with the uncritical glam his library’s social media account endows him with — resurfacing campaign posters that present Tricky Dick’s frumpy face as if he was the 1970s version of Jacob Elordi — I think Nixonmaxxing’s potential in terms of spurring educational curiosity is terrific. 

It’s getting young people interested in history. 

Right now, in a world where education is mired in AI slop, a viral video might just be the gateway drug into actually reading a book. 

Visiting a museum.

Or even inspiring a career of civic service. 

The study of history is the practice of interrogating stories, evaluating competing sources and providing a balanced assessment. 

For its part, the Nixon Library and Museum does acknowledge Watergate. It has a whole wing devoted to the scandal. 

And if that isn’t enough, there have been entire libraries of books written about that mysterious break-in, just waiting for the curious mind to crack them open.

That’s the real Nixonmaxxing — taking on the lessons, and scandals, of history head-on. 

To paraphrase the philosopher George Santayana, we need a young generation to engage with history so that they can figure out how not to repeat it. 

And maybe, in 2026, that starts with pressing “like” on a Nixon meme. 

Harrison Blackman is an editorial assistant at The California Post.

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