Weeks ive been talking about president ial power. Weve been talking about the way Foreign Policy is formed, where were talking about domestic policy and some of the tools president s have. This week, were going to talk about some of the pitfalls of being president and weve hinted this along the way because weve been talking about the ways that president s are kind of really hemmed in, in terms of their abilities to do their job. And so one way that obviously creates Serious Problems for them to be able to act is when they are confronted with scandals that sometimes of their undo oh doing and sometimes that are that are kind of relation to whats going on in politics. So this week were spent a lot of time talking again about limitations on the presidency and this gets to our big theme about the way that the is really limited by these institutional designs right on purpose. Theyre supposed to be limited in how act and this is a story about the way that these political circumstances can sometimes exacerbate some of those tension. So well get a chance to talk about the way that the scandals affect lawmaking, the way it affects sort of their ability to survive in office and everything in between. This is motivated by a lot of recent events where weve seen the number of scandals ballooning in american politics. So this quote from donald trump, i think says it all. He says, i could stand in the middle of fifth avenue and shoot somebody and i wouldnt lose voters. Okay . Its like incredible what hes trying to get out is basically that scandals are less important and impactful than they used to be. And so this motivated to me to kind of think about how this manifests in terms of president ial. Power and the ability for president s to get things done. So one kind of summary question that a lot of people were asking was, you know, because President Trump had a tendency to exacerbate the truth and in some cases outright lie, there have been this sort of commentary and concerns about the way that american president s are dealing with the people. And we have a lot of discussions we weeks ago about the way that, you know, the presidency was designed to try to lead public opinion. And some of the limitations in the ability to do so. And so one question is like whether or not these things have an effect on the American People at all. I want to make a case to you that its hard for people to think scandals matter. That is, in some ways, scandals matter a lot less than they used to. And ill provide some details about how that works. But i want to just sort of hint and note at the outset that its not just about politics, where we see this kind of process, where scandals dont matter as much as they used to do. Youll remember the deflate gate controversy in the nfl. So if you didnt know and it didnt work, paying attention during those years, tom brady basically and the patriots were accused of deflating some of the footballs so that as quarterback, you could get a better grip on them and therefore throw them better. Right. This is a no no. And of course, nfl rules have like specific kind of requirements about, you know, what the precise level of inflation should be of these footballs. But it became a controversy because the patriots got caught. And so this is a kind of mini scandal in the world of football and people and some colleagues of mine wrote about this and so they basically took this one case study to decide if that was something that was problematic for people. And what they found was really interesting and very political. And i want to show why. So what they actually found was that when they did these sort of surveys of the publiabout deflate gate, that basically what they found is that that the peoples beliefs about e scandal, it was highly polarized by team loyalty. So if you ke the patriots didnt care. If you hated the patriots, its the worst scandal like in the history of the nfl. This is perfectly aligns with the way we think about partizanship right. Youve got team red and team blue and you dont make any kind of crossover. And so that i think definitely creates a similar kind of pattern. We also find that the gaps are largest among people who are the most ierested and knowledgeable fans. So people who are likely to be paying a lot of attention to this or to politics are the ones who are most affected by it. So again, just like in politics, scandals only affect some people and they certainly affect people in a very partizan way. So i think this is really kind of stunning to see that the same patterns were talking about are going to affect more or less what happens in both football and in politics. Okay. So just to give you a kind of summary of what well talk about and some of the highlights of the literature on this, the effect of scandals can be very different depending on the kind of scandal. So obviously in many cases you see serious damage to a president when theyre involved in these kinds of scandals. Sometimes irreparably. Im finishing reading this book on watergate. Its called watergate a new history. And you ask like, you know, how much can you learn about a scandal at this point . Already 50 years old, theres a lot. And it tells us a lot about the way that the system responds to scandal and. So obviously, thats a scandal that was debilitating for the nixon white house. But there are also other scandals that have very little impact. And so ill give you a bunch of these that really dont amount to much. And so in that sense, scandals only matter if theyre kind of of a certain Type Approval of the president. Definitely. ll talk about the ways president s try to get around this for members of congress at least you see a reduction in vote share like when they run agaithat the scandal will reduce how much of the vote they get. And of course, conditional on when the scandal occurred, you ow, this likely to be more impactful or less impactful. The type of scandal matters and other conditions. So ill give you some details kind of when were likely to see the president kind of most damaged by these various scandals. I guess the good news in terms of thinking about the big picture is that basically these scandals do still matter, although they dont affect everybody in the same way. And president s as partizans can kind of hide behind some of those labels. Its certainly been the case that the system shows a lot of adaptability to these scandals. And so president s are not just going to get going to get off when they these things happen. There are still sort of elements within the political system that limit how they might get away with it. So scandals still do matter. And weve had a lot of them in american history. There have been several that we we we have seen one of the more famous ones, the first really big one was this one. This is the whiskey ring from 1875. This involves l meers of the grant administration. A grand is a k w hero. And the consensus to be prident. But his administration was rife with corruption. Ione of the very first president ial scandals, we see rsal secretary, along with other federal employees, taking bribes from whiskey distillers so that they wouldnt have to pay taxes on alcohol production. Ultimately, 110 people were convicted of defrauding the government and it told out to about 3 million. And i actually did look this up because im just not much of a nerd. And this is Something Like 1,000,000,000 in todays money. So this is a lot of money that was able to wiggle around. And this was one of the first in history, the one that was the more impactful than this, though, has been the teapot dome scandal. You hear this talked about a lot as really the first scandal that involved the president directly and got up to the level of the cabinet. So this takes place in 1922. This is basically about 100 years ago. The teapot dome refers to basically a plot of land in california and i want to take you back to a time where like the us Domestic Production of oil was all the oil they had. They didnt get oil from other places. Everything they produced in the country was consumed in the country. And so the us navy needed to have a steady supply of it. And so they this oil in california under the teapot dome. Well, the good news is that they can use that and the navy was ing reap the benits. The bad news is that its ripe for potential corruption. Sofa, who was secretary of the interior, which charged with accepting bribes from various oni in angeor the exclusive rights to drill for the oil underneath there. It was the first time in history en convicted and went to so its an interesting relationship. Warrdings considered to be at lousy president because he was sort of facilitated this kind of this back slapping, you know, let it go along kind of a thing. And as a result, obviously, the scandal happens. We actually talked or first week about the president greatness measures and how Warren Harding typically is very low on that list. And this is one of the reasons why so i want to fast forward a little bit, though, to talk about how we might measure scandals in a more modern sense. So just to kind of draw on a bunch of work that ive done in terms of how we talk about president ial scandals and other scandals, the way we link this is to look at htorical trends. And so from the seventies to more or less the presentwean look at scandals that e particular pieces of misbehavior. So this is things that are either moral wrongdog some kind opontial legal wrongdoing. It requires that this be a puiching, not a rum, d it requires the president to have to act. Or in this case, i also include governors and members of congsssenior Administration Officials and other federal nominees. So over time, thes a l of scandal. So 150 plus scandals, the National Level for president s, at includes the presidt well as like, you know, cabinet members, like for like we just mentioned, there are about 338 state scandals involving governors and governors staff. And then theres more than 300 congressional scandals. So thats a lot a lot of scandals, right. And so we can use these data to be able to kind of see how the scandals have an effect on the political system, especially on the president now. So these are things that are scandals, right . Legal, wronged doing moral wrongdoing. But there a lot of things that are not scandals that get talked about. So one thing its not a scandal is, for instance sort of decoration ideas. You may remembermelania trump decorated the whiteouse with these red christmas trees. This because it, you know,on defied sort of normally members are what normally the white house does. So this is not a scandal in any particular way. And it actually i should is hard to be able to determine sometimes whats a scandal . Its not a scandal. So, for instance, last week this became kind of an ongoing dispute discussion and all this controversy about the use of bears in national parks. So basically the white house sort of threw the park service was going to introduce bears to particular places in the country where there needed to be kind of an increase in the bear population. This got kind of magnified. And so you can see that as a partizan issue. Everythings a scandal potentially, right, if you can kind of make it that. But at least for definition and purposes in terms of what ill show you, this is not a scandal. This is just kind of outrage. But it underscores the really important point, and that is that basically this is something that you can manufacture, right . You can create this outrage over just about anything. And if you can create an outrage scandal over anything, then really nothing is a scandal. And so in some sense, then scandals dont matter. But well talk about some ways that they they, in fact, do. So, i mean, if you think about this and theres this kind of sort of concept that basically like scandals are happening all the time, and its really just debilitating a system. But the reality is that thats not really whats happening. And ill show you some verifiable numbers over the course of, what, 50 years that give you a sense of how many scandals there are . Its a lot, but not so many that theyre happening every even though sometimes it seems like it right. If you look at the history of this, especially with respect to president s, its not all scandal all the time. Scda happen frequently, but not necessarily in proportion to the coverage that most people assume. Financial scandals tend to dominate personal and political scandals are less impactf. So these are things that either people are making mistakes or the things that you can track. And so as a result, you know, thats a happy occasion because its not just people who are corrupt. Sometimes its rules that are problematic or theyre not being enforced properly. And thats things you can fix. Also, most scandals dont involve the president. And so although we tend to think of these scandals as being things that hurt the president , sometimes it doesnt involve them at all. Its just the people around them. So we can tease that a little bit as we go. So talking about the various scandals, theres lots in president ial history that weve seen. Obviously, Richard Nixon i mentioned a bit ago is the poster for politicalcandals. But realistically, you know, other president s have got a significan number of scandals, o. Ronald reagan with irancontra. Yeah, well talk abt at in a little bit. Bill clinton with whitewater a e lewinsky scandal and george h. W. Bush, who had some scandals in nominees like clarence thomas, theyre all add up to a healthy number of scandals, but not so much that it kind of hits your imagination in a in a big way. Its so heres a list of scandals by president , and you can see some variation like that im talking about. And although nixon tends to get the, you know, kind of most problematic, most, you know, kind of president , hes not the most scandal ridden president , the most scandal ridden president is donald trump. You can see there from the number there exceeding 50 in just a short four year period. Ronald reagan, although he was president for eight years, is number two. There. He gets more than 40, followed by bill clinton, who comes in at a third place. Youre happy to get the bronze medal on this one. Right. But obviously some of the scandals have been pretty impactful because a lot of them involved him personally or his finances personally. So you can see some variation in terms of these issues. And its interesting to note that obviously some president s have a lot of scandals and some president s dont have that many scandals. So i said, i mean, you know, trump gets a lot of attention for being a, you know, president who was in office while a lot of these scandals happened, many of them were related to him. Sometimes they led to his impeachment. Sometimes they were about his cabinet at the atlantic. Here notes that trump scandals are never done. They seem to get worse. But one question that people who studies scandals and certainly president s, personal scholars who think about the way that scandals impact the white house is kind of when these scandals come. And so there is this assertion that you know, scandals get worse in the second term because president ial or ability to control what happens is minimized. You have a new kind of staff oftentimes and you oftentimes have a kind of conflict with congress, which does increase the number of scandals. So if you look at this, you can see some term based change. So, for instance, looking at president s who had two terms, you can see some interesting dimensions in most cases, president s had more scandals in their first term than their second term. And this is sort of not whats expected. You would expect to see kind of the opposite. You expect to see more like the bush 43 pattern where he has more scandals in the second term than the first term. Like i said, you know, you oftentimes see Congress Flip and you oftentimes have a kind of change in terms of the like like the leadership in the white house, you know, staff turnover and things like that. And so instead of the group that brought you to the white house, you trust implicitly, sometimes you have like another group of people who maybe dont trust as much or maybe arent as looking out strong, looking out for your interest. So you see some changes. Whats also interesting is that you see here some of the more impactful scandals though in the second term. So reagan with irancontra, irancontra, nixon obviously with watergate, which kind of crosses over a couple of terms, and clinton with the lewinsky scandal, these are tend to be kind of bigger scandals. You see in the second term. So although, you know, we expect the opposite, we do see more big scandals in the first term. Then in the second term. So lets about what these scandals look like. So like i said, mostly they tend to be kind of financial, personal and sometimes political. Theyre kind of evenly split. Most of the big scandals tend to be financial and origin of some kind. Some of them are international in origin. So for instance, the trump ukraine scandals fit here. Irancontra fits here. So they dont tend to be international in origin, like in the way that you often might think that like, you know, movies would portray. But they do obviously tend to have International Implications in some cases. So you dont see it that much. But there is a category there. But if youre a president and youre sort of stuck in this world, you have to decide what youre going to do when youre confronted by scandals. You have to take some kind of strategy. And so over time, weve seen president s adapt their behavior to how the media and opposition in congress are attacking you and so we can see a couple of different ways that president s might approach how to get out of a scandal. And so to our sort of big question weve been asking is like, you know what, the scandals still matter and whether they still have an impact on the white house or on the political system. Well, president s can try to sort of game that a little bit. And they might do this in one of two ways so you might see a president is very forthcoming in terms of what happened during the scandal. So you see kind of reagan an one hand, you know, very kind of and the other is sort of stonewalling where you try to limit what people know about the scandal with the hope that you can limit the ability for that scandal to continue to get worse. The thing is that those strategies both have implications. And so talking about the ways that they sort of functionally is worthwhile. So lets talk about the the cases where president s might stonewall. So i put nixon here as a good example, is one of those situations where he stonewalled everything. I dont want anyone to know anything about whats happening, but other president s have taken a slightly different tact. So i want to give you some kind of rationale for why they do this and draw in some work that people have done to look at the strategies and then talk about kind of some of the character mistakes that might produce stonewalling. But lets talk about what this is. So what does it loo