In September of 2024, FBI agents acting as businessmen met with the acting head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement Tom Homan under the guise of helping to secure government contracts if Trump were to win the upcoming election. During the meeting, Homan reportedly accepted a bag of fifty thousand dollars cash inside a Cava takeout bag. However, once Trump took office and Homan was appointed as border czar, the investigation was suddenly dropped. At a White House press briefing after the story broke in October of 2025, press secretary Karoline Leavitt responded in the administration’s usual deny-and-dismiss fashion: “Well, Mr. Homan never took the fifty thousand dollars that you’re referring to, so you should get your facts straight.” 

Leavitt’s cavalier attitude towards the corrupt actions of an administration official is in line with the scandal-laden Trump administration’s broader approach to misconduct – minimize the allegation, dismiss the evidence, and redirect blame rather than engage with the substance of the charge. 

For years in American politics, even the smallest of missteps could produce outsized backlash. Howard Dean let out an awkward scream on live TV and his entire presidential run collapsed. Barack Obama wore a tan suit to a press conference and it sparked days of outrage. There once was a time where even tiny breaks from “how you’re supposed to act” in politics triggered backlash not only from the media, but voters – which meant shame and norms actually had power. 

That world is gone. 

Now we’re in a moment where politicians can face indictments, corruption charges, ethics violations – and barely lose support. Scandal doesn’t work the way that it used to, because the soft guardrails in the form of norms have lost their grip on the system. Norms are the unwritten rules that guide ethical behavior. Norms aren’t laws, however. Their entire power rests on self-restraint, shame, and a fear of consequences. They have never been enforced, but for a long time they didn’t need to be. 

The system ran on a set of shared understandings – lines you simply didn’t cross, even when the law technically allowed it. Levitsky and Ziblatt describe two of these unwritten rules as the essential guardrails of a democracy: mutual toleration and forbearance. The first is the simple idea that your opponents, regardless of how you feel about them, are still legitimate actors in the system. The second is the more demanding  norm – the expectation that those in office will restrain themselves, that they won’t squeeze every drop of power out of what the law technically permits. These norms were never enforceable, but they acted like an informal constitution, essentially inherited understandings about how power should be used and how far any actor could push before they were seen as dangerous. For a long time, that was enough. 

But the first cracks in those norms appeared long before Trump. Throughout the ‘70s and ‘80s, scandals produced swift negative outcomes – resignations, firings, removals, criminal charges. The Watergate era saw extremely high “end in disgrace” rates. But beginning in the 1990s, the introduction of Gingrich-era hyperpolarization resulted in a new era of politics characterized by zero-sum thinking: if “they” win, “we” lose everything. Norms didn’t win elections. And once it became clear that norms didn’t win elections, politicians treated them as expendable. What mattered was loyalty, not conduct. 

The new political logic is simple: if a candidate can help the party defeat the enemy, their behavior – however unethical – is tolerated or defended. In the polarized era, politicians are 23 percent more likely to survive a scandal than they were just a generation earlier. The examples pile up quickly. Eric Adams responded to a five-count federal indictment as if it were a political ambush rather than a career-ending scandal. Senator Bob Menendez was found with gold bars in his closet and still tried to cast himself as the victim of a witch hunt. And Trump – who’s scandals range from being found civilly liable for rape to tax evasion to his long-documented proximity to Jeffrey Epstein – has survived every revelation by insisting that the real crime is the investigation itself. In each case, the response was the same: deny everything, frame accountability as persecution, and move on like nothing happened. 

There’s a reason that these scandals no longer play their traditional role as a means of holding politicians accountable. McCoy et al. argue that polarization aligns all social, cultural, and political differences into a single “us vs. them” identity. Voters stop viewing the other side as legitimate opponents, and instead as dangerous, immoral criminals. Once voters perceive the opposing side as a threat to the nation, they in turn tolerate democratic norm violations by their own leaders. This includes tolerating attacks on courts, the press, crimes committed by party members, scientific expertise, and the rule of law. Both elites and party members begin to justify illiberal actions–undermining institutions, circumventing rules, ignoring judicial rulings, and refusing to compromise. The result is the crumbling of governance: either paralysis as seen by the recent longest government shutdown in U.S. history, or unilateral rule by whichever side holds power.

What makes this breakdown even starker is the way the system now protects those who violate its rules. As polarization intensified, co-partisans in Congress and state legislatures became significantly less willing to censure, investigate, or remove members of their own party, effectively eliminating mechanisms of accountability. At the same time, the rise of partisan media ecosystems and the expansion of expansion of ideologically segmented outlets have produced an environment where scandals are not uniformly interpreted as they once were, but filtered through a partisan lens. Scandals are reframed as politically motivated attacks, get diluted and lost in the shuffle of a fragmented media environment, and are frequently replaced by conspiracy-based counter-narratives that reinterpret even well-documented wrongdoing by legitimate journalists as evidence of bias and “fake news”. 

The apparent invincibility of figures like Trump in the wake of scandal after scandal is not an aberration, but rather evidence of the soft guardrails no longer functioning as they should. As long as polarization continues to collapse all political conflict into an existential struggle, voters and those in power will have stronger incentives to defend norm-breaking than to come out against it. That trajectory has clear implications. A political system already struggling with weakened institutions, limited oversight, fragmented media, and extreme partisan distrust will face even steeper challenges if this trend continues and future leaders decide to test its boundaries. 

What this signals is a shift from scandal as a mechanism of accountability, as a part of the soft guardrails Levitsky and Ziblatt deem essential, to scandal as a strategic tool of power. If officials recognize that wrongdoing no longer results in meaningful consequences – no firings, no indictments, no political cost – the incentives flip. A regime with a high tolerance for embarrassment and full confidence in its own impunity can move into territory that administrations still playing by the rules – back when scandal actually carried weight – would  never have imagined: luxury jets from foreign governments, crypto schemes, openly self-serving deals. And if those in power learn that even blatant misconduct carries no real penalty, what reason is left to follow the rules at all? 

Over time, that balance selects exactly the kind of leader who is most dangerous in a democracy: someone who sees the lack of consequences as permission to go even further. The erosion of soft guardrails doesn’t happen all at once; it builds slowly, scandal by scandal, until even the illusion of restraint disappears. The question going forward isn’t whether future leaders will push those boundaries – it’s whether any remaining institution or political cost will be strong enough to push back. 

References: 

Carrier, McKenzie, and Thomas Carothers. “U.S. Democratic Backsliding in Comparative Perspective.”Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Last modified August 25, 2025.https://carnegieendowment.org/research/2025/08/us-democratic-backsliding-in-comparative-perspective?lang=en.

Chang, Ailsa. All Things Considered. Podcast, audio. https://www.npr.org/2025/07/29/nx-s1-5453777/president-trump-is-breaking-or-ignoring-all-sorts-of-presidential-norms.

Kelley, Lora. “An Era of Shamelessness in American Politics.” The Atlantic. Atlantic Monthly Group. Last modified September 27, 2024. Accessed November 21, 2025. https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2024/09/an-era-of-shamelessness-in-american-politics/680063/.

Levitsky, Steven, and Daniel Ziblatt. How Democracies Die. Broadway Books, 2019. https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/northeastern-ebooks/detail.action?docID=6054530.

Marcus, Ruth. “Tom Homan and the Case of the Missing Fifty Thousand.” The New Yorker, October 20, 2025. Accessed December 1, 2025.https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-lede/tom-homan-and-the-case-of-the-missing-fifty-thousand.

McChrystal, Stanley. “Why a ‘Strong, Charismatic’ Leader Is Not the Solution to America’s Tumultuous Times.” Time. Time USA. Last modified October 25, 2018. Accessed November 21, 2025. https://time.com/5434629/win-at-all-costs-politics-stanley-mcchrystal/.

McCoy, Jennifer, Tahmina Rahman, and Murat Somer. “Polarization and the Global Crisis of Democracy: Common Patterns, Dynamics, and Pernicious Consequences for Democratic Polities.” American Behavioral Scientist 62, no. 1 (2018): 16-42. https://doi.org/10.1177/0002764218759576.

Montanaro, Domenico. “The Longest Government Shutdown in U.S. History Is Over. Here’s What You Need to Know.” NPR. Last modified November 15, 2025. https://www.npr.org/2025/11/15/nx-s1-5609367/trump-government-shutdown-what-to-know-longest.

Rottinghaus, Brandon. “Do Scandals Matter?” Political Research Quarterly 76, no. 4 (2023): 1932-43. https://doi.org/10.1177/10659129231185532.