Jon Lovett gets real about Richard Nixon and Watergate
A history lesson from the former Obama speechwriter started quietly on Saturday, and by Wednesday its comments were full of thank-yous from people who never learned Watergate this way in school.
Lovett or Leave It
Story of Why this story? The video is running at 34,901 views a day, 13 times its usual pace (2,766).
Let's be real about Richard Nixon and Watergate
Most of this week's clips on Lovett or Leave It settled in the low thousands: Laura Benanti on bad lifeguards, Barry Diller on how Hollywood has changed, Jared Goldstein's plea to stop saying "colorway." The Watergate video began the same way, with about 4,000 views on its first day. Four days later it has passed 50,000, and it is still pulling in more than ten times what it usually does in a day.
"Let's be real about Richard Nixon and Watergate" puts Jon Lovett, the show's host and a former speechwriter for Barack Obama, in front of the scandal that began with a 1972 break-in at the Democratic National Committee's offices in the Watergate complex and ended with Nixon's resignation in August 1974. The video is illustrated with photos from the AP archive. The description frames it with a pointed question: are Republicans now trying to whitewash it?
The comments read like a classroom after the bell. Many viewers thank Lovett for making the history accessible to younger people, and one says their teachers never went this deep. Others write that they followed the story as young news watchers at the time. The closing punchline gets its own praise, with one viewer tying it to Jimmy Carter's years in office, and another singles out the speechwriting itself.
The rest of the channel is having an ordinary week, with daily views sitting right at their usual level. That makes a lesson about 1974 the one video doing something unusual.
Published on Trari
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- Channel
- Lovett or Leave It
- Subscribers
- 147,000 ▲ 1,000 this week
- Channel views, last 7 days
- 612,253
- Channel views, pace per day
- 71,906 (on a normal day: 74,370)
- Video published
- October 3, 2026
- Video views so far
- 51,398 (4 days online)
- Video views, pace per day
- 34,901 (on a normal day: 2,766)
The numbers
A slow first day, then a steady climb: the Watergate clip stands well apart from everything else the channel posted this week.
💡 Test your knowledge
Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein broke much of the Watergate story while working for which newspaper?
Woodward and Bernstein were reporters at The Washington Post, whose Watergate coverage won the 1973 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.
