JD Vance says that the Watergate scandal would be a 12 hour story?

[Morbius]

7. I'm actually old enough to remember this.

The break-in happened in mid 1973. It was a story, not huge but real. Congress started investigating. The national news would report on the Congressional goings-on and not too many people paid much attention. Then one day during an interview (in '74, I think) someone in Congress asked a witness what he did at the White House, and the guy said that he changed the tapes.

That's when everything changed. Congress demanded the tapes, the White House refused, ultimately the Supreme Court sided with Congress and ordered the White House to produce the tapes, and the brouhaha involved in this made a kind-of-boring scandal into a really, really big deal.

Today the corporate media wouldn't cover it the same way, and the current Congress wouldn't conduct a real investigation. So Vance is actually right about this; it probably wouldn't attract much attention. The current administration is brazenly corrupt, pretty clearly the most corrupt in history, and the only people who care are partisan Democrats. The Nixon administration was desperately trying to hide that it was using the tools of government, including the FBI and CIA, for political ends; the Trump administration isn't trying to hide it.