PECKERWOOD'S WEEKLY LUNOCRACY POST! The Ghost of Tricky Dick for the Week of 10/6/2025!

He still lingers here. You can smell him before you hear him — that ghostly musk of flop sweat, Old Spice, and moral rot baked into the wallpaper of the West Wing. Richard Milhous Nixon, spectral and swollen with grievance, still pacing the Oval Office at 3 a.m., muttering about “the press” and “the Jews” and the long con of American virtue. The lights flicker when he’s near. The portraits turn their faces toward the wall. Even Andrew Jackson won’t look at him.

Every administration since has pretended they buried him, but Nixon never went underground — he went systemic. His ghost isn’t haunting Washington; he is Washington. He’s the unkillable architecture of paranoia that powers the republic now — the data-mining, the black budgets, the men who believe the law is just a suggestion until someone leaks it. The only thing that’s changed since Watergate is that now, the bugs are in our pockets and we pay monthly for the privilege.

He materialized to me last night, just after midnight, when the moon hung low and jaundiced over the Potomac. I was halfway through a glass of something brown and unforgiving when I heard it — that distinct rasp, the ghost of a man who still can’t believe he got caught. “They all did it,” he said, voice thick with grave dust. “They just weren’t as clever.” He leaned close, his jowls like damp upholstery. “I gave them the blueprint. They just digitized it.”

He’s not wrong. Every cheap demagogue and right-wing martyr since has been Xeroxing Nixon’s paranoia like a sacred text. Trump was just the parody version — Nixon’s tactics performed by a carnival barker without the charm. The true disciples are quieter, smoother — the think-tank clergy and surveillance evangelists who preach “security” while eroding the Bill of Rights one click at a time. Nixon invented the permanent campaign; the rest of them perfected the eternal gaslight.

I asked him what it was like — hell, purgatory, whatever penal colony he’s been condemned to. He smirked. “It’s classified,” he said. The bastard still thinks everything belongs to him.

And then came Roy Cohn, drifting through the wall in a silk suit the color of blood money, flashing that shark smile that used to haunt every ambitious closet case in mid-century America. “You started without me,” he purred, lighting a phantom cigarette that smelled like sulfur and sin. Nixon glared at him, the way dead men glare when they realize the truly damned have better seats. “He’s mine,” Nixon snapped. “He’s everyone’s,” Cohn answered.

That’s when the lights blew. My drink turned to ice. The air filled with the sound of paper shredders — a thousand deleted tapes, a million destroyed memos. History itself trying to hide the evidence.

Before he faded, Nixon turned, one final flicker of jowled resentment. “I wasn’t the worst,” he said, as if bargaining for an obituary upgrade. “Wait till you meet the next ones.” He gestured toward the dark corner where Cohn’s shadow lingered. “He taught the next generation.”

Roy winked, slick as always, his voice pure venom wrapped in charm. “Tune in next week, darling. We’ll be discussing closets, dossiers, and the original FBI drag queen — J. Edgar Hoover.”

The chandelier rattled. The air went cold. And just like that, the séance ended.

America’s first ghost president had left the building. But trust me — he’ll be back.

He didn’t vanish after Watergate; he just went cloud-based. Nixon’s ghost runs on every server farm west of the Mississippi, whispering into the code that sorts voters, profiles dissent, and pretends to know what freedom looks like in 4K resolution. Every time your phone lights up with a “security update,” that’s him—checking the tapes, redacting the present tense.

I can still hear him breathing through the walls of the West Wing, that wheezy metronome of guilt and justification. He isn’t haunting the country; he built the house we’re trapped in. The foundation was poured with paranoia, the drywall stuffed with plausible deniability, and the roof tiled with shredded memos. The thing leaks lies whenever it rains.

The Machinery of Paranoia

Nixon didn’t invent American suspicion; he just industrialized it. The FBI had been snooping since telegrams were a novelty, but he gave surveillance its suburban ZIP code. Suddenly everyone could be an informant, every enemy a domestic threat. “National security” became the adult word for fear.

He talked about law and order the way addicts talk about sobriety—loudly, often, and with the conviction of someone who’s already using again. The plumbers, the taps, the secret fund in the basement—none of it was an aberration. It was a pilot program. After him, every presidency learned to keep its crimes tidy, to hire better attorneys, to route the wiretaps through telecoms instead of burglars.

When the Patriot Act came decades later, I could almost hear Nixon chuckling in the static: They finally made it legal.

He would have adored metadata—so much cleaner than break-ins, so polite in its tyranny. No need for flashlights and tape recorders when the citizens volunteer their coordinates. The apps do the espionage for you; all you need is a warrant and a friendly judge who owes you a favor.

That’s the genius of his ghost: it doesn’t rage anymore, it automates. What he built out of fear, Silicon Valley built out of convenience, and both called it progress. The difference between Watergate and the cloud is just branding.

The Cult of Respectability and the Lie of Law and Order

Nixon’s “Silent Majority” was never silent; it just liked to imagine itself persecuted while running the show. They wore their conformity like camouflage, insisting they were the victims of people with less power. That posture—the injured authoritarian—became the template for every right-wing crusade since. The world never stopped taking cues from his insecurity.

He hated the elite because he could never stop auditioning for them. That’s the original American tragedy: the outcast who wants to be accepted by the country club that despises him, so he burns down the neighborhood instead. His resentment was so pure it metastasized into policy—southern strategy, war on drugs, moral panic as governing principle. It still polls well.

You can trace the genealogy straight to today’s television demagogues: the same tone, the same martyrdom, the same sweaty insistence that real Americans are under siege by librarians and empathy. Nixon taught them that paranoia sells better than hope and that righteousness sounds truer when you’re recording your own downfall.

He turned victimhood into a management style. Even now, every political campaign begins with the same ghostwritten complaint: They’re laughing at us. The old line still works because it was never about policy; it was about humiliation, and no one knew humiliation like Tricky Dick.

He told me that himself once—or whatever passes for conversation between the living and the eternally indicted. “They thought I was vulgar,” he said, “but they used me.” The air smelled like mildew and entitlement. “I gave them the blueprint,” he said again, almost tenderly, as if betrayal were a design principle.

I told him he’d succeeded. The blueprint became the republic.

The Eternal Campaign

Nixon never stopped running. Even in death, he’s still on the trail—pressing phantom flesh, staging debates in the afterlife, trying to spin his damnation into a poll bump. He’s the prototype for the twenty-four-hour political organism, the man who turned democracy into a marketing plan.

Before him, presidents governed, then campaigned. After him, they never stopped campaigning. The apparatus he built—the ad men, the pollsters, the whisper networks—became the permanent nervous system of American politics. Everything after Nixon became optics: the handshake, the photo op, the prepackaged empathy. The modern candidate isn’t elected; they’re launched.

He discovered that reality could be edited if you controlled the footage, that confession meant weakness, and that charisma was optional if your enemies looked unwashed enough. The ghost knows that the presidency isn’t a job; it’s a broadcast slot. You don’t have to fix the country—you just have to make sure your ratings stay up until syndication.

Every time a modern politician cries on camera, hires a stylist, or leaks their own scandal for sympathy clicks, that’s Nixon’s ghost behind the curtain, whispering, Play the victim, not the villain—it sells better.

He was the first to confuse paranoia with patriotism. He fused them into one seamless brand and printed it on every flag pin in Washington. “Trust, but verify,” said the successors. But the real motto of the Nixon ghost state is simpler: Spy first, apologize later.

The Ghost’s Legacy

The true American horror isn’t that Nixon came back; it’s that he never left. He survived every impeachment, every scandal, every think-piece eulogy. He shapeshifted. Reagan turned him into a smiling moralist, Bush turned him into a doctrine, Trump turned him into performance art.

And through it all, the surveillance state grew teeth. What Nixon had to steal, they now subpoena. What Nixon had to hide, they now monetize. The FBI wiretap became the algorithm; the enemies list became the follower count. The whole country is bugged, and we call it content.

When I told his ghost that, he laughed—a wet, rattling sound that made the lightbulbs dim. “See?” he wheezed. “They learned efficiency.”

He’s right again. The corporate-state merger, the religion of secrecy, the paranoia disguised as patriotism—it all started with him, the man who hated being watched but couldn’t stop watching everyone else. His was a heart wired for surveillance.

And now, we all have one in our pockets.

I’ve come to think that Nixon’s real victory wasn’t 1968 or 1972—it was 2001, when the fear machine he designed finally received its halo of legality. The Patriot Act was his posthumous pardon. His corpse smiled in Yorba Linda, and somewhere in the data centers of Utah, his ghost got a corner office.

He wanders those halls now, clicking through profiles, salivating over metadata, whispering, “They called me paranoid. Now it’s just policy.”

The Return of Roy

The séance flickered again. The smell of burnt ozone and moral decay rolled through the room, and there he was: Roy Cohn, in a white suit so bright it looked radioactive. “I told you he’d get nostalgic,” Cohn said, exhaling smoke that hung in the air like perjury. “You can’t keep a ghoul from his paperwork.”

Nixon glared, that old Quaker resentment reanimating his jowls. “You ruined the art of denial,” he hissed. “You made it flamboyant.”

Roy laughed—the dry, delighted laugh of a man who’s been kicked out of heaven and found it boring anyway. “Denial is flamboyant, darling. That’s the point.”

They circled each other like history’s worst pas de deux—one the architect of paranoia, the other its decorator. Cohn straightened his tie, eyes glinting with infernal charm. “Tell your readers to tune in next week,” he said, his voice dripping camp and contagion. “We’ll discuss my dear friend Hoover. Closets, curtains, and the cost of pretending you don’t wear rouge.”

Nixon vanished first, leaving behind the faint scent of bourbon and moral cowardice. Cohn lingered longer, ever the showman, ever the shadow. “America never exorcises its ghosts,” he whispered. “It gives them security clearances.”

The chandelier stilled. The tape stopped spinning.

I closed the circle, blew out the candle, and poured myself another drink.

Outside, the night hummed with static and secrets. The ghost of Tricky Dick was gone, but the room was still bugged.

Roy Cohn

Next week: “Lunocracy: The Closet Within the Closet.

photos:AP, Getty, NYT, NBC, Politico