As President Donald Trump proceeds with his seemingly endless attacks on laws and democratic norms, the question for many has become: What will turn the tide? They may imagine that conditions are ripe for a major scandal—some transgression, previously hidden but then revealed, that is so outrageous, so beyond the pale, that it will rally even those across the political divide.
In the past, that is the work that scandal often did. Exposure of serious official misconduct, the lifeblood of scandals, would create openings for reform. As bad as these scandals were—and the underlying story was usually bad, sometimes very bad—scandals contained within them the germ of change. But today, old-fashioned scandals are harder and harder to come by.
Watergate is in many ways the textbook example of a scandal and its reforming potential. It had it all: covert and illegal actions by a president in contravention of laws and norms, the revelation of the scandalous activities, and, eventually, bipartisan agreement on corrective action and reform. Those reforms included extensive new regulation of money and politics, protection against the abuse of surveillance power to spy on American citizens, and authority for independent investigations of possible executive-branch criminal misconduct.
This cycle of scandal and bipartisan reform is hardly imaginable today. In the Trump administration, what might have been deemed scandalous at another time, in another presidency, is instead a governing program. The components of the program—“radical constitutional” claims about presidential power, White House direction of investigations against political opponents, the abandonment of constraints on profiting from the office—are openly avowed and openly pursued. What was hidden until exposed in the Richard Nixon years is proclaimed in these Trump years as a show of presidential resolve and as the vindication of an electoral mandate. Nixon had resigned and left his office before he told an interviewer that, by definition, no presidential action can violate the law. Trump expressed the same view—that no president can violate the law if he is striving to save the country—in the first weeks of his second term. He is redefining the presidency, resetting expectations of his office.
The death of scandal is a blow to the mechanisms for defending a democracy. More than periodically useful in uncovering corruption, scandal is an essential feature of liberal democracy. It is certainly, the sociologist John Thompson writes, “more common [in such systems] than in authoritarian regimes or in one-party states.” This is because, in democracies, scandal is possible only because there is intense electoral competition, a free press, and protections from reprisal for news organizations, the political opposition, and others that allege and often expose corruption in the government in power. But when democratic norms fray or collapse, scandal collapses with them. In this way, the collapse of scandal is both cause and effect of democratic decline: It makes reform less possible, and it indicates erosion of the conditions that made such revelations possible in the first place.
Trump is directly attacking those conditions. He is maintaining and in some instances escalating lawsuits against news organizations. He has fired inspectors general who serve as “watchdogs” in 17 executive-branch agencies. Trump has fired the head of the Office of Special Counsel, whose responsibilities include enforcement of the whistleblower statutes, and replaced him with a former Republican member of Congress who is also the secretary of Veterans Affairs—effectively making it a part-time position. He is exploiting the fractured and polarized media environment to create alternative realities, rendering it very difficult for any sort of unified narrative of scandal to emerge and take hold. A sterling example is his redefinition of the January 6 assault on the Capitol as “a day of love,” complete with pardons for most of those convicted for their involvement.
The corrective power of scandal was already weakened during the first Trump term. In those years, Trump did not hide his pursuit of profit while in office, and he made efforts to control the Department of Justice for his own personal and political purposes—though nothing like what we are seeing today. These and other actions of the time ignited major controversies and led to two impeachments, but none entailed revelations of actions he was denying. He proclaimed “perfect” the call to the president of Ukraine at issue in the first impeachment, and in the second, his rally and video communications related to the attack on the Capital could not have been more public. After Trump left office, reforms to constrain his version of the presidency were proposed in abundance but went nowhere.
Even where scandal does not yield statutory reform, it can serve to reinvigorate weakened norms. An example that may now seem quaint is the furor over the George W. Bush administration’s midterm firing of nine U.S. attorneys. The firing was public; the motive was the stuff of scandal: It emerged that the White House had been deeply involved in the dismissals, acting on concerns that these law-enforcement officials were insufficiently committed to rooting out alleged Democratic Party voting “fraud.” The attorney general denied any questionable motivation and agreed that “it would be improper to remove a U.S. attorney to interfere with or influence a particular prosecution for partisan political gain.”
But the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General and Office of Professional Responsibility jointly took up the matter and concluded, “The Department’s removal of the U.S. Attorneys and the controversy it created severely damaged the credibility of the Department and raised doubts about the integrity of Department prosecutive decisions.” The Office of the Inspector General further judged that there was “significant evidence that political partisan considerations were an important factor” in the dismissals. It affirmed that department officials had a “responsibility to ensure that prosecutorial decisions would be based on the law, the evidence, and Department policy, rather than political pressure.” In part because of this scandal, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales resigned.
This was not all. A special counsel was appointed to consider whether the firings involved any violations of criminal law. She concluded that no violations had occurred but that the law did prohibit some forms of political interference in law enforcement. And she roundly affirmed department “principles” against “undue sensitivity to politics.” The Obama administration advised Congress of these findings and put a strong emphasis on the point: Its attorney general was committed to “ensuring that partisan political considerations play no role in law enforcement decisions of the Department.”
There is little reason to imagine that we would see a “scandal” concerned with “undue sensitivity to politics” in this presidency. The norms at the center of the U.S.-attorney scandal are not honored even in the breach, because the breach has been transformed into policy. As the legal scholar (and my collaborator on the Substack newsletter Executive Functions) Jack Goldsmith has noted, the Trump White House’s proclaimed policy of avoiding “‘the appearance of improper political influence’ in law enforcement is doublespeak for the reality of heavy political influence in law enforcement, just as the Justice Department’s ‘Weaponization Working Group,’ which builds on Trump’s ‘Ending the Weaponization of the Federal Government’ executive order, is in reality a playbook to weaponize DOJ law enforcement like never before.” Officials appointed to high positions, including the U.S. attorney in D.C. and both the FBI’s director and its recently named deputy director, have appeared eager to investigate those who were involved in investigations of Donald Trump.
In this environment, there seems to be one potential opening for scandal on the old model: the role of Elon Musk. Some of the elements of scandal are present in this case of a businessman, situated both inside and outside the government, who has been provided with apparently massive but undefined authority. It’s never quite clear when Musk speaks for himself, for his businesses, or for the government. The administration has given varying accounts of his role in the Department of Government Efficiency. Musk himself has made the extraordinary claim that voters are at least an indirect source of his authority. Last month, he reposted on X: “Dems keep saying ‘No one elected Elon Musk.’ Yes we did. Elon was very visible with Trump and we elected Trump to utilize Elon.” Polls show that even among Republicans, Musk is a controversial figure. It is not impossible to imagine a reform at some point designed to impose limits, or at least greater accountability and transparency, on a president’s use of a private citizen to assume major government functions.
Perhaps the picture for reform even without the propulsive force of scandal will brighten if the administration fails to deliver on issues that bread-and-butter voters care most deeply about and they become less tolerant of “long live the king” presidential leadership. Monarchical ambition can founder on the price of eggs and bacon. It can also eventually run aground in conflict with a defining element of American political culture: distrust of government, a belief that it is, as the historian Garry Wills has written, a “necessary evil, one we must put up with while resenting the necessity.” Trump’s aggressive claim that the president is the law is altogether new, and coming fast at the electorate. Perhaps in this limited time, the voters are waiting and seeing. Trump and his allies may not appreciate that they are testing, and may not prevail over, America’s anti-government tradition. After all, they are the government now.
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