On Feb. 24, 2026, Caldwell writes:
The outline of this story has been known to historians since James Hougan laid it out in Secret Agenda (1984): a brilliant young sailor named Charles Radford memorized, photocopied, and purloined classified documents from Nixon’s National Security Council, sometimes even emptying Henry Kissinger’s briefcase, and delivered them to a hawkish group of high military officers led by Admiral Thomas Moorer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Alarmingly intimate accounts of arguments over military strategy began showing up in the syndicated columns of journalist Jack Anderson.
What is new in Rosen’s account is the context in which Nixon places the crisis. It came to a head in the last weeks of 1971, as his administration was planning the great strategic surprise that arguably won the Cold War – namely, America’s “opening to China,” the secretly negotiated rupture in the Sino-Soviet alliance. It happened at the height of the bloody war between India and Pakistan over Bangladeshi independence, and Pakistan, then a pariah state, had been the “bridge to China,” Nixon revealed. Kissinger, accompanied by Radford on a trip to Pakistan, had feigned illness to secretly visit China, and was offering extraordinary American support to Mao Zedong: “If India jumped Pakistan and China decided to take on the Indians,” Nixon explained in the secret testimony, “we would support them.”
This essay is the clearest window yet into what Caldwell has been doing across the last three pieces. Read alongside the Trump obituary and the Easter column, it completes a pattern, and the order of publication matters for seeing the pattern clearly.
The Nixon essay came first, on February 24. The Trumpism obituary followed on March 18. The Easter column on Trump’s change came last, April 17, 2026. Caldwell wrote Nixon before Trump’s Iran war broke the coalition nerve, wrote the obituary when the war forced him to register the break, and wrote the Easter column when the break needed a Catholic vocabulary to carry it. The sequence is not a man retreating from a failed leader. It is a man building a position and then being overtaken by events that tested it.
The pattern across the three is a coalition intellectual laying out a constitutional theory, then watching its American champion make the theory harder to defend, then adjusting the defense to preserve the theory while distancing from the man.
Caldwell’s Nixon essay in February is the opening move. He uses Rosen’s revelation to make the case for the unitary executive and against the deep state. The argument is historical and structural rather than personal to Trump. Nixon is positioned as the serious man of the theory. Trump is mentioned only in the closing paragraphs, where Caldwell names the continuity between Nixon’s fate and Trump’s first term. The essay is an attempt to establish the theoretical ground on which the coalition stands. The ground is Federalist 70, the administrative state, and the post-Watergate reforms as the founding violation of American democratic self-rule.
Then the Iran war broke out in March and Trump made the Federalist 70 case much harder to defend on contemporary grounds. The March 18 obituary registers the break. The April 17, 2026 Easter column performs the ritual distancing in a Catholic register. By the time the Easter piece runs, the Nixon essay has become retroactively useful in a way Caldwell may not have planned. The theory had been lodged in Nixon’s name before Trump’s behavior made it embarrassing to lodge it in Trump’s. The constitutional argument now has a historical anchor that cannot post Jesus images on Easter morning.
The Nixon essay is the theoretical setup. The obituary and the Easter column are the improvisations that followed when the live carrier of the theory betrayed it. Caldwell’s project across the three pieces is the preservation of the constitutional argument against the unreliability of its American champion.
Alliance Theory reads this as the predictable maneuver of an intellectual who remains committed to his coalition’s cause while his coalition’s leader makes the cause harder to represent in public. Nixon is a safer carrier of the cause because Nixon is a symbol rather than a live politician. Trump costs Caldwell’s respectability weekly. Nixon costs him nothing. The Nixon essay, written before the Iran war, turns out to be unusually well timed. It establishes the argument in a form that can outlive the Trump presidency regardless of how that presidency ends.
Alexander’s Watergate framework sharpens the Nixon piece itself and produces the most interesting observation.
Caldwell is attempting to run a reverse purification ritual on Watergate. Alexander’s argument was that Watergate worked as democratic ritual because five conditions aligned: consensus that the event was polluting, perception that pollution reached the center, activation of institutional social control, mobilization of differentiated elites as countercenters, and effective ritual symbolic interpretation. The result was that Nixon crossed from the sacred side of the classification table to the profane side, where he stayed for fifty years.
Caldwell is trying to run this table backwards. He wants to move Nixon from the profane column to the sacred column. His symbolic operations are visible in every paragraph. Rosen’s new revelations are cast as evidence that Nixon was defending the republic against a genuine military spy operation. The Moorer-Radford affair becomes the real pollution, located inside the national security establishment rather than inside the Oval Office. The deep state, not Nixon, becomes the polluting agent. Kutler’s 1990 line about Nixon ranking with the two Roosevelts is pressed into service as evidence of a prior consensus that woke history has since corrupted. The Washington Post, the Senate committees, the inspectors general, the 1978 Ethics in Government Act all move from the sacred column of democratic self-purification to the profane column of bureaucratic capture. LBJ wiretaps King, so Nixon’s wiretaps are normal. Every president keeps classified documents, so the Pentagon Papers response is normal. Even the break-in to Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office gets acknowledged as a problem only to be subordinated to the larger narrative of Nixon’s strategic vindication on China.
This is coalition counter-ritual work of a high order. Alexander’s framework gives it a name. Caldwell is attempting to pollute the purifiers and sanctify the polluted. He wants the Watergate settlement reclassified as the founding violation of American democratic self-rule, and Nixon reclassified as its first victim. The argument is not new in its components. It has been circulating in Claremont and among the legal right for years. What makes the February 24 timing interesting is what it preceded rather than what it followed. Caldwell was establishing the historical anchor for the argument at exactly the moment the contemporary anchor was about to come loose. Whether this was foresight or luck, the effect is the same.
Alexander’s framework also predicts the essay’s likely reception. A reverse purification ritual requires the same five conditions as the original. Caldwell has none of them. There is no consensus among non-conservative readers that Watergate was wrongly decided. No institutional authority is preparing to reopen the verdict. No differentiated countercenter has mobilized outside the right. No liminal ritual space has opened in which Nixon can be reclassified. The essay performs ritual symbolism among readers who already agree with it and makes no impression on anyone else. The Claremont orbit, the nationalist-populist right, and the American Conservative set will circulate it. The broader audience will not notice. This is carrier-group work for internal coalition morale, not cross-coalition persuasion.
The essay also reveals something Caldwell has been careful to hide in his better work: the convenient beliefs problem Stephen Turner would catch immediately. Caldwell’s new Nixon is the Nixon the argument requires. He was patriotic, constitutionally loyal, eventually handed over the tapes, never terrorized his aides, managed the China opening brilliantly, and was destroyed by his own decency rather than by his ruthlessness. This is not the Nixon of the tapes themselves, which are still publicly available and which document conversations about using the IRS against enemies, hush money for the burglars, anti-Semitic outbursts, and extensive plans to subvert the constitutional order. Caldwell knows the tapes exist. He writes as if they do not. A writer who elsewhere insists on historical specificity here paints a composite Nixon that serves coalition purposes more than historical accuracy.
The Dean quotation is the most revealing sleight of hand. Caldwell uses Dean’s line about Nixon saying impeachment would be handled properly to make Nixon sound statesmanlike. The same Dean testimony in the same book describes Nixon telling him the payments to the burglars could be obtained, we could get that, asking how much would be needed, and discussing the use of the CIA to block the FBI investigation. Caldwell quotes the sentence that helps and omits the sentences that do not. This is normal coalition writing, and Caldwell is usually more careful about not doing it. The carelessness is informative. He needed the Dean quotation to do work it cannot really do, and he used it anyway. That is what happens when a writer has decided the conclusion before the evidence.
The essay’s strongest move is the point about Zelizer’s formulation. Caldwell takes Zelizer’s description of the post-Watergate reforms, “a fragile wall was constructed to separate the Department of Justice from the political interests of the Oval Office,” and turns it on its head. He reads the wall as a separation of the executive from the electorate rather than as a protection of law enforcement from political capture. This is his best argument and it is genuinely interesting. A case can be made that the post-Watergate reforms did create an administrative state harder to democratically control. Serious legal historians on both the left and the right have made versions of this case. Caldwell’s version is weakened by the carrier-group framing, but the underlying argument is not empty.
The problem is that the underlying argument, taken seriously, would not require Nixon’s rehabilitation at all. One could argue that the post-Watergate reforms overshot their mark without also arguing that Nixon was patriotic and constitutionally loyal. The two claims are separable. Caldwell fuses them because his coalitionApril 17, 2026, after Trump’s Easter performances, Caldwell writes the change-has-come column that keeps the movement alive while detaching it from the man. The three pieces move from theoretical foundation to coalition grief to Catholic ritual distancing. The common thread is the preservation of the constitutional case. The Nixon essay supplies the case’s historical anchor. The obituary supplies its obituary for the coalition’s recent vehicle. The Easter column supplies its moral grounds for the break with the current carrier. Read in order, the sequence is coherent coalition management under difficult conditions.
Alexander’s five-factor analysis makes the limitation sharp. Caldwell cannot reverse Watergate’s ritual classification by writing essays, no matter how well written. The classification was not a rhetorical event. It was a social accomplishment that required an alignment of conditions between 1972 and 1974 and has been sustained for fifty years by continuing institutional reinforcement. Unmaking it would require either a parallel alignment of conditions or a collapse of the institutions that sustain it. Caldwell has neither. What he has is prose. The prose cannot do the work. It can only register the wish.
The final observation is that Caldwell in 2026 is beginning to resemble the figures he once diagnosed. In The Age of Entitlement he described the civil-rights carrier group as intellectuals laboring to sustain a ritual classification against increasing counter-evidence. He was cold and precise about how that labor worked. He is now doing the analogous labor in reverse, attempting to sustain a counter-ritual against the settled civic classification of Watergate while also managing the public behavior of the man who was supposed to be the counter-ritual’s living champion. The asymmetry he once noticed in others is now visible in his own work. Writers who notice the mote in the eye of their rivals rarely see it in their own, and Caldwell is not an exception to that rule. He is only more interesting because he built the optics that would let someone else see him clearly, and then used them on everyone except himself.
Caldwell writes an op-ed. Steve Sailer writes a notebook entry on the same story. That genre difference carries most of the weight.
Caldwell’s essay runs about twelve hundred words, tightly structured, with a visible argumentative arc. It opens with the Rosen revelation, moves through the Moorer-Radford affair in summary, names the deep state connection, ties Watergate to Trump, and closes with a thesis sentence about who is to blame. The essay has a point and drives toward it. Every paragraph is subordinated to the argument. The prose is plain, sentences are even in length, and the voice is restrained. This is high-journalism form, designed to carry a claim into mainstream readers’ heads.
Sailer’s piece runs roughly three thousand words and reads like a man thinking at his desk. He block-quotes the Rosen article at length, interrupts his quotations with his own observations, wanders into personal anecdote (the Kissinger question at Rice in the late 1970s, the George Harrison concert, the bit about Radford and Woodward possibly being in adjacent Navy cells), pauses to discuss whether South Vietnam actually could have held if Congress had funded them, digresses into the Mormon role in the American deep state, and ends with speculation that Radford and Woodward may have been parallel operatives for the same admirals. There is no single thesis. There is a cluster of observations around a shared theme. The piece is closer to a private blog post circa 2005 than to a magazine essay.
This difference in genre tracks a difference in coalition position, and the coalition difference is the interesting one.
Caldwell is writing to move the Watergate classification. He wants the received understanding reversed at the level of American civic consensus. His essay is a ritual intervention aimed at readers who still accept the standard account and might be persuadable. He knows the intervention will mostly fail, but the attempt requires the high-journalism form because only that form can reach the audience the intervention would need to persuade. Every sentence in the essay is working to be quotable by someone writing for a broader audience.
Sailer is writing to his own subscribers. He makes no attempt to persuade a reader who does not already share most of his premises. He takes for granted that the deep state is real, that Nixon got a raw deal, that the official Watergate story is incomplete, and that the interesting questions are the secondary ones about who did what to whom. He is not trying to move the classification. He is filling in texture for readers who have already moved.
That the two essays came out so close together sharpens the point. They are both responding to the same news within the same short window, with access to the same underlying materials, writing for audiences that overlap considerably at the level of personal sympathy and diverge completely at the level of respectable venue. The comparison is a natural experiment in what carrier-group position does to prose.
The Sailer piece is better informed than the Caldwell piece on the subject matter itself. Sailer has read Silent Coup, knows the Woodward naval career, knows Radford is a Mormon, knows Scowcroft is a Mormon, knows Jack Anderson was a Mormon, and puts that pattern on the table. He traces Haig’s career after 1973 and points out that Kissinger’s career was not damaged by the Moorer-Radford affair even though Kissinger was the nominal target. He notes that Moorer himself suffered no consequences. He observes that the espionage did not change any outcome. He places the Bangladesh war in its actual geopolitical context with enough detail to make the Cold War stakes concrete. Caldwell mentions the China opening and the India-Pakistan war but does not do any of this texture work. His version is a thin summary in service of his thesis.
Caldwell is better at ideological framing than Sailer. Sailer’s piece has no sustained political argument. He hints at one, the note that Nixon’s first term was more leftist than LBJ’s, the observation about Mormons in the deep state, the parenthetical about Bob Woodward’s intelligence background, but he does not build toward a claim. His gestures are scattered. Caldwell pulls together a clean argument about the post-Watergate administrative state, Federalist 70, and the 1978 Ethics in Government Act. He links Nixon to Trump explicitly and names the continuity. He produces a single thesis that a reader can carry away.
The trade-off is legible. Caldwell has argumentative structure and coalition discipline. Sailer has texture and curiosity. Caldwell has coalition professionalism in its upper-middlebrow form. Sailer has the autodidact’s willingness to say what interests him even when it does not fit the case.
The symbolic operations differ accordingly.
Caldwell runs a purification ritual. He wants Nixon repositioned in the sacred column and the post-Watergate reform apparatus repositioned in the profane column. The whole essay is organized toward this reclassification. The Zelizer quotation, the Kutler quotation, the comparison to LBJ and Kennedy on corruption, the Dean line about impeachment being handled properly, all of these serve the ritual move.
Sailer does not run a ritual. He enjoys the story. He is interested in whether Radford and Woodward worked for the same admirals. He is interested in whether Haig encouraged Radford. He is interested in whether Kissinger really was the target or whether Kissinger’s survival suggests that the whole thing was theater. He is interested in whether American air power in 1972 was actually decisive and most people missed it. These are the interests of a man who likes historical puzzles and does not feel much pressure to resolve them into a political verdict.
The Mormon observation is a case in point. Caldwell would never write that sentence. The Mormon pattern is real, potentially illuminating, and also socially dangerous in a way Caldwell has trained himself to avoid. He writes from inside the respectable right’s permissible frame, which allows criticism of the deep state as a structure but not identification of the communities whose members populate it. Sailer writes outside that frame. He notices what he notices and puts it on the page. The noticing is what makes his piece interesting and also what keeps him on Substack instead of in The Spectator.
The simultaneity of the two pieces rules out the easy explanation that Caldwell is condensing Sailer’s work for a respectable audience or that Sailer is responding to Caldwell’s framing. They are two writers reacting independently to the same week’s news, producing very different artifacts from the same raw material. The difference is not a product of sequence. It is a product of position.
Both writers are carrier-group intellectuals for overlapping but distinct constituencies. Caldwell carries the national-populist Catholic right into elite precincts. Sailer carries the race-realist dissident right on his own platform. Each has paid the price and earned the privilege of his particular coalition position. Caldwell has access to The Spectator, The New York Times, and the Financial Times. Sailer has a paid Substack audience that will read three thousand words on whether Bob Woodward was a naval intelligence asset. Each man’s writing reflects the incentives of his perch.
On the story, Sailer is the better source. He is more curious, more textured, and more willing to push into genuinely uncertain terrain. Caldwell is the better essayist. He builds a case that can travel and that can be used by other writers to shift the received understanding, assuming the shift ever comes.
The deeper comparison is about what each man is doing with his talent.
Caldwell is a high-end journalist who has narrowed into a carrier-group function for a particular subset of the right. His essay on Nixon is a good example of what he does well within that function and an example of its costs. The argument is clean. The ritual move is visible. The historical texture is thin because texture is not what the function requires.
Sailer is something harder to place. He is not a journalist in Caldwell’s sense. He is a noticer who writes down what he notices. His pieces rarely have a single argument because his mind does not work in single arguments. He follows connections. Sometimes the connections are brilliant and sometimes they are wrong and sometimes they are merely interesting, but they are always genuinely his own. He is less disciplined than Caldwell and more independent. Both qualities are inseparable.
If you asked which writer is better at the work each has chosen, both are, within their respective domains, very good. If you asked which piece is more likely to be cited in ten years, Caldwell’s, because it will fit into the larger Claremont-Federalist Society argument about the administrative state. If you asked which piece is more likely to have gotten the story right, Sailer’s, because he cares more about the story than about the argument.
The honest summary is that Caldwell is a coalition intellectual in the strict sense, producing prose that serves a faction’s strategic ends with restraint and skill. Sailer is an individual observer who has built his own small institution around the simple act of paying attention. They are not doing the same thing. They are not in competition. They are examples of two different ways an intelligent man on the right can make his living in 2026, and each way has its characteristic strengths and its characteristic distortions.
