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.
Your post raises a striking point about how scandal has lost its capacity to discipline political actors, a shift that carries profound implications for democratic accountability. What I found particularly compelling is your focus on shamelessness not simply as a personal trait, but as a strategic political resource. When leaders realize that denying wrongdoing, no matter how implausibly, produces fewer electoral costs than apologizing, they effectively rewrite the incentive structure that once kept democratic norms intact.
One angle worth expanding is the role of partisan identity in driving this transformation. Scandals used to matter because they appealed to shared moral standards. But as parties become more like social tribes, citizens increasingly evaluate not the offense, but the accuser. In that sense, scandal hasn’t disappeared; instead, it has been reframed as an attack from an out-group, which actually strengthens in-group loyalty. This aligns with research showing that supporters are often more mobilized by allegations against their candidate than discouraged by them.
Your discussion of “political Teflon” also invites consideration of how shamelessness interacts with media saturation. When audiences are bombarded daily with scandals, the threshold for what counts as disqualifying behavior rises dramatically. This echoes theories of democratic erosion, suggesting that constant norm-breaking eventually dulls the public’s ability to recognize when lines have been crossed.
Perhaps the most concerning implication of your post is the notion that if scandal no longer constrains political elites, then one of the informal guardrails that sustains liberal democracy has effectively eroded. And once that guardrail collapses, restoring it becomes extraordinarily difficult.
When reading your title, my first thought was the article “Corruption as the Only Option: The Limits to Electoral Accountability” by Nara Pavão. This article explores how people become more tolerant of corruption when they view it as their only option, when they see that the majority of politicians are engaging in corruption.
This is an interesting avenue to continue your post, exploring the consequences of this disintegration of vertical accountability, which you begin to explore at the very end: “what reason is left to follow the rules at all?”
Overall, I thought your analysis was great. I hadn’t thought about the application of the breakdown of democratic norms such as mutual toleration and forbearance in the context of scandal. You did a great job fitting this into the broader context of actions that contribute to democratic erosion, effectively tying together different course concepts.
Another possible factor that I saw space to explore is the increased affective polarization that Rachel Kleinfield explains in “Polarization, Democracy, and Political Violence in the U.S.” You touch on this when you assert that loyalty is more important than conduct. When mutual toleration erodes, affective polarization increases, which in turn leads to increased lack of accountability and tolerance for scandal. This reveals a stepping stone between mutual toleration and toleration for scandal.
The framing of scandal shifting from the accountability mechanism to a “strategic tool of power” is very sharp. But, is shamelessness itself the cause here, or is it a symptom of something deeper about how political accountability actually works?
This post suggests that norms functioned because of self-restraint and the fear of consequences. But I’d argue norms only ever worked because voters punished norm violations at the ballot box. The real shift isn’t that politicians became shameless, it’s that their voters stopped caring, or at least stopped caring more than they care about partisan victory. In that sense, shamelessness is a somewhat rational behavior in a changed environment.
This reframing matters because it changes where we look for solutions. If the problem is shameless politicians, the answer might be better candidates or stronger ethical standards. But if the problem is that voters now prioritize partisan loyalty over conduct, then the accountability breakdown runs much deeper than individual bad actors.
I’m also curious about whether a fatigue with scandals plays a role that the post doesn’t fully address. When voters are bombarded with constant allegations (some being serious, some exaggerated), it becomes harder to distinguish genuine corruption from political hootenanny. The sheer volume of Trump-era controversies may have overwhelmed the public’s capacity to process any single one as disqualifying. In that environment, dismissing scandals as “fake news” becomes more plausible, not because people are naive, but because they’re exhausted.
This leads me to a big question: does accountability require not just functioning norms, but also an information environment where scandals can actually break through?
Reading your post made me realize how different scandal feels today from what I had assumed it always meant. Scandals previously held politicians accountable, but we now see that deep-seated polarization leads voters to shrug off scandals, seeing the ‘other side’ not just as rivals but as existential threats. I find this idea terrifying: if our definition of politics is now ‘us v. them,’ it no longer matters what a leader does. Now, all that matters is what team they’re on. It feels like democratic accountability has become optional.
Another interesting dynamic in your post is how shamelessness has become a political tactic. When politicians realize that, no matter what they do, their supporters will stick with them, they stop trying to hide their wrongdoing. Scandal then becomes less risky the more often it happens, and the electorate becomes desensitized.
Your point about norm-breaking also stood out to me; it is increasingly worrying that erosion can come from repeated boundary-pushing, leaving institutions that rely on accountability obsolete. Norms only work when the public and political figures enforce them, so the decline of the power of scandal becomes a metric of democratic backsliding.
At the same time, though, when voters prioritize loyalty in their respective parties over actual policies or actions, it makes sense that they would care less when the politicians on ‘their side’ do something scandalous. The shift may speak more to voters’ priorities than to politicians’ actions.
One thing I’d add is the role of celebrity culture in all of this. Trump came into politics as a celebrity, someone who used to attention and spectacle and almost craves it, and that helped him survive scandals that would have sunk a normal politician even before his reelection. Because people were already fascinated by him, and because media coverage often treated him like entertainment, his mistakes didn’t carry the same consequences, and instead, they became part of his show rather than moments of accountability when it comes to politics.
This has harmed democracy as seen in the US. Due to the fact that leaders can act unethically without real consequences, it sends the message that loyalty and personality matter more than competence or integrity, or even their policy. Both voters and party officials start to tolerate, or even normalize, irrational behavior that would have been untolerated in the past. Partisan media and social media also fuel this by amplifying drama instead of focusing on accountability. Since the media, over time, has become dependent on sponsors and engagement.
Scandals have shifted from being a check on power to becoming a tool for politicians to use to their advantage. Trump’s long-established celebrity status made it easier to turn potential crises into performances, keeping his supporters engaged and opponents frustrated. Over time, this makes it harder to enforce democratic the norms, because ethical breaches no longer feel risky to him or his administration, and the focus is on the soft news instead of responsibility as an administration. At this point, Trump has seemed to overstep almost every unwritten democratic norm, including mutual toleration, institutional forbearance, accepting election outcomes, respect across party lines, and the protection of minority rights.
Hi John!
I really appreciate the reflections you’ve made in your work. Our modern-day political environment certainly has shifted within the last decade—and so have the standards we hold for our leading political figures. What once was considered unacceptable behavior in the field of political science (for example, accepting a plane from a foreign nation as a personal gift to the president) is now hardly recognized as a wrongdoing. At the very least, such acts are no longer barred by the institutions that protect our democracy from erosion. Perhaps the most frightening act of all, was when the United States welcomed an alleged pedophile into the White House for a second term. The standards upheld not just by the people, but by our institutions is reflective of an immense change in the qualities we prioritize as a nation.
Even without context, this idea alone is bothersome. But it does propose the question: if a leading figure cannot hold themselves accountable for their faults, who do we expect to do so? Perhaps the rhetoric these leaders utilize aids their ability to avoid accountability by those who support them. But what about for institutions themselves? Why do our crucial institutions that are meant to resist undemocratic acts have trouble doing so? It is this aspect in particular that indicates our democratic norms and values are in the process of eroding. When our institutions bend to the will of an undemocratic leader, who can we trust to stop the process of democratic backsliding? This is of course, an incredibly complex question, but one worth exploring to accompany your research.
I am a massive fan of the concept of shamelessness in politics. I also believe another factor is how undesirable the office of POTUS is now. In my opinion, this really started with Clinton and the Monica Lewinsky scandal. The sheer amount of ire that gave the population of the United States stripped the position of president of any shreds of respect it had. The fact that not only a president would do that, but have it displayed on every news channel in the country started a trend that every little detail of the public and private life of a president would be scrutinized upon ascending to the job. Extreme polarization means that not only would you have the media looking for a divisive story to reign in viewers, but you also have your opponents who view you as an enemy, meaning they are also digging and agitating to find any dirt on you. The President may be respected by one half of the nation, but they are reviled by the other half. This makes the office extremely unattractive, especially to people who may aspire to a career in public service. Why would anyone want their past sins to be presented in front of the nation? This leads, in my opinion, to unscrupulous characters who have nothing to lose to ascend to the presidency. Any person with a sense of decency wouldn’t risk their most shameful moments to be shown in front of the world, but those who don’t care see themselves as having nothing to lose. This has only exacerbated the erosion of these norms, as candidates may present themselves as great people, but in reality have thousands of skeletons in their closets, and they don’t care about showing them off. Since Clinton, when we hear about a scandal egregious like that of the Epstein Files or even Trump’s track record of women, many of us who are politically inclined are outraged. But one must think, for the past 35 years there has been a hounding of every detail of the president’s life, and there must be some kind of silent majority who simply no longer care. This is proof to me at least that many of these norms or standards are near, if not already, gone.
Hi John,
Your post does a great job showing how scandals have lost their power as mechanisms of accountability in American politics. One point that seems especially important is how scandal fatigue interacts with what political scientists call asymmetric tolerance. Once voters and elites decide that the opposing party represents an existential threat, the cost of holding one’s own side accountable becomes higher than the cost of ignoring wrongdoing. In that environment, scandals stop functioning as signals of unfitness for office and instead become loyalty tests. The leader who can survive the most revelations becomes the one most trusted to fight the enemy.
Another angle that strengthens your analysis is the connection between norm collapse and information ecosystems. Earlier eras of scandal assumed a shared factual baseline. Today, the fragmentation of media allows any given scandal to be reframed, selectively interpreted, or rejected entirely. This means the public no longer even experiences scandals as common events. They become partisan narratives rather than violations of democratic expectations. Once that shared understanding disappears, shame loses its ability to function socially.
I also think your point about incentives deserves emphasis. If politicians learn over time that misconduct carries no consequences, the system naturally selects for leaders who are willing to test boundaries even more aggressively. Scandal no longer deters norm breaking but rewards it by demonstrating partisan loyalty. This helps explain why each political cycle feels more extreme than the last. When the soft guardrails no longer work, the threshold for what counts as unacceptable behavior rises dramatically, and the danger to democratic institutions grows with it.