Johnson won the election in one of the largest landslides in American presidential history. But the scandal-mongering mattered. In the early 1970s, when the next Republican president was under investigation for corruption and abuse of power, the monstrous image of Johnson that conservative media helped to paint became part of President Richard Nixon’s defense.

Conservative media figures did their best to downplay Nixon’s crimes, especially in relation to Johnson’s. Nixon himself called Watergate “a crappy little thing” in his private (but secretly recorded) Oval Office conversations. Henry Regnery dismissed the accounts of Watergate, writing, “I can see no grounds for impeachment, or even to get worked up about.” National Review called the crimes “objectively trivial” and dismissed “the media’s daily spasms of moral indignation” as “a gleeful put-on.”

Even after Nixon had resigned, the magazine still argued that he had been persecuted for actions far less serious than Johnson’s. Hedging even as they accused, the magazine’s editors pointed to “the belief, though not the proof, that Lyndon Johnson greatly surpassed Nixon in venality.” After running through the litany of Johnson’s sins, the editors expressed hope that one day people would look more kindly on Nixon “as the shady deals of previous presidents become known.”

In the 1960s and 1970s, the conservative media sphere was quite small: a handful of publishers, magazines and radio programs. The activists behind those outlets could influence politics, but they did not have the totalizing power that would allow them to ignore the world outside of the conservative movement. They could not persuade the vast majority of Americans that Johnson was notoriously corrupt, nor shrink Watergate hearings into a small box on the screen and propagandize over it.

The rapid expansion of conservative media in the 1990s and 2000s, and the conservative scandal machine that powered it, transformed American politics. During the Bill Clinton era, new scandal-mongering magazines and websites made up what Hillary Clinton accurately called a “vast right-wing conspiracy.” What followed was a cynical, partisan impeachment that treated the serious constitutional remedy as just another political game. In so doing, Republicans diminished the significance of impeachment, making it less likely the public would take the current impeachment crisis seriously.

The Clinton impeachment showed that the Republican Party was fully on board with the conservative media’s scandalization project. The whole thing was tawdry, and yet two years later the Republicans controlled the presidency and both houses of Congress. Scandalization worked, so they returned to it again and again. Even Republican presidential candidates got in on the act, as when President Trump led rallygoers in chants of “Lock her up.”