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Tanned, rested and ready, he’s been dead for 32 years.
Surprisingly, Richard Nixon, the most outrageous American political figure of the 1970s, seems to be making a comeback, at least online. It’s called Nixonmaxxing, and it involves a series of edited social media videos that cut archival footage of Nixon into rap tracks and turns the 37th president into the kind of cool, masculine hero 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, Calif.-based nonprofit founded in 1983 — by Nixon himself — that has long been dedicated to protecting Triky Dick’s public image. It seems that they have now decided that he should look like Walton Goggins in a Tarantino picture.
Of course, Nixon did not completely disappear from the ether of popular culture. Over the decades, he has emerged as a person in a bottle Futuramahad a whole story on HBO The guardsHe appears on rubber masks during a bank robbery in Break point He recently appeared in a Steven Spielberg film Disclosure dayin which he is shown touring dead alien corpses at a secret government base — a reference to a part of UFO lore in which Nixon supposedly took his golfing buddy Jackie Gleason to a Florida air base to show off top-secret ET corpses.
However, let’s make one thing perfectly clear: the Nixon Foundation’s videos — which include excerpts from EsDeeKid’s “Rottweiler” and BIA’s “We on Go,” as well as a clip from mad menDon Draper throwing his support behind the RMN (“Kennedy? I see a silver spoon. Nixon? I see myself”) – is something else entirely, more posthumous political rehabilitation than funny satire. These steps 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 is behind the bold social campaign? The organization credits its marketing team with “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 on the job after taking a 14-month leave of absence to work as President Trump’s man at the National Archives. We’ll guess he’s the one to take the blame or the credit, depending on whether you agree with Don Draper or not.
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Also in the Rampling Reporter:
It may be dog-eat-dog Hollywood, but among the wealthy on Long Island, canines are getting a live-in; Is Dean Cain right about Supergirl’s earrings?
This story appeared in the June 16 issue of The Hollywood Reporter. Click here to subscribe.
