well, so for the last couple of

weeks i've been talking about presidential power. we've been talking about the way foreign policy is formed, where we're talking about domestic policy and some of the tools presidents have. this week, we're going to talk about some of the pitfalls of being president and we've hinted this along the way because we've been talking about the ways that presidents 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 what's going on in politics. so this week we're 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.

they're 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 we'll 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 we've 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 wouldn't lose voters. okay? it's like incredible what he's 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 presidential. power and the ability for presidents 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 presidents 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 it's hard for people to think scandals matter. that is, in some ways, scandals matter a lot less than they used to. and i'll provide some details about how that works. but i want to just sort of hint and note at the outset that it's not just about politics, where we see this kind of process, where scandals don't matter as much as they used to do. you'll remember the deflate gate controversy in the nfl. so if you didn't know and it didn't 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 public about deflate gate, that basicly what they fod is that that the people's beliefs about the scandal, it was highly polized by team loyalty. so if you like the patriots didn't care. if you hated the patriots, it's the worst scandal like in the history of the nfl. this is perfectly aligns with the way we think about partizanship right. you've got team red and team blue and you don't make any kind of crossover. and so that i think definitely creates a similar kind of pattern. we also find is that the gaps are largest among people who are the most interested and knowledgeable fans so people who are likely toe

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 we're 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 we'll 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 they're involved in these kinds of scandals. sometimes irreparably. i'm finishing reading this book on watergate. it's 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, there's a lot. and it tells us a lot about the way that the system responds to scandal and. so obviously, that's a scandal that was debilitating for the nixon white house.

but there are also other scandals that have very little impact. and so i'll give you a bunch of these that really don't amount to much. and so in that sense, scandals only matter if they're kind of of a certain type approval of the present. definitely. we'll talk about the ways pridents try to get around this for members of congress at least you see a reduction in vote share like when they run again that the scandal will reduce how much of the vote they get. and of course, conditional on when the scandal occurred, you know, this likely to be more impactful or less impactful. the type of scandal matters and other conditions. so i'll give you some details kind of when we're 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 don't affect everybody in the same way. and presidents as partizans can kind of hide behind some of those labels. it's certainly been the case that the system shows a lot of adaptability to these scandals. and so presidents 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 we've 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 whiskeyfrom 1875. this involves several members of the grantintration. a grand is a kind of a war hero. and tns to be president. but his admini w rife with corruption. and so in one of thers presidential scandals, we see his personal secretary, along with other federal employees, taking bribes from whiskey distillers so that they wouldn't 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 i'm just not much of a nerd. and this is something like $1,000,000,000 in today's 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 didn't 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 me. well, the good news isthey can use that and the navy was going to reap the benefits. the bad news is's ripe for potential corruption. so albert faul, who was a secretary of the interior, w charged with accepting bribes from various oil companies in exchange for the exclusive unrneath there.the oil it wasirstime in history

that a us cabinet official had been convicted and went to jail. so it's an interesti relationship. warren harding is considered to be a sort a lousy president beca 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 i've done in terms of how we talk about presidential scandals and other scandals, the way we link this is to look at historical trends. and so froth sevti to more or less the present, we can look at scandals that are particular pieces of miehior. so this is things that are either moral wrongdoing or some kind of potential legal wrongdoing. it requires that this be a public thing, not a rumor, and it requires the presiden to

have tac or in this case, i also includ governors and members of congress, senior administration offial and other fedal nominees. so over time, there's a lot of scandal. so50lus scandals, the tional level for presidents, that includes the president as 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 there's more than 300 congressional scandals. so that's 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 it's not a scandal is, for instance sort of decoration ideas. you may remember that melania trump decorated the house with these red christm trees she got a lot of pushback on this because it, you know, defied sort of what 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 what's a scandal? it's 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. everything's a scandal potentially, right, if you can kind of make it that. but at least for definition and purposes in terms of what i'll 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 don't matter. but we'll talk about some ways that they they, in fact, do.

so, i mean, if you think about this and there's this kind of sort of concept that basically like scandals are happening all the time, and it's really just debilitating a system. but the reality is that that's not really what's happening. and i'll show you some verifiable numbers over the course of, what, 50 years that give you a sense of how many scandals there are? it's a lot, but not so many that they're happening every even though sometimes it seems like it right. if you look at the history of this, especially with respect to presidents, it's not all snd all the time. scandals happen frequently, but not necessilin ppoion to the coverage that most people assume. financial scandals tend to dominateernal and pital scandals are less impactful. so these are things that eitr people are making mistakes or the things that you can track. and so as a result, you know, that's a happy occasion because it's not just people who are corrupt. sometimes it's rules that are problematic or they're not being enforced properly. and that's things you can fix. also, most scandals don't involve the president. and so although we tend to think of these scandals as being things that hurt the president,

sometimes it doesn't involve them at all. it's just the people around them. so we can tease that a little bit as we go. so talking about the various scandals, there's lots in presidential history that we've seen. obviously, richard nixon i mentioned a bit ago is the poster for political scandals. but realistically,ou know, othepridents have got a significant number of scandals, too. ronald reagan with iracora. yeah, we'll talk about that in a little bit. bill clinton with whitewater and the lewinsky scandal and george h. bh, who had some scandals in nominees like clarence thomas, they're 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. it's so here's a list of scandals by president, and you can see some variation like that i'm talking about. and although nixon tends to get the, you know, kind of most problematic, most, you know, kind of president, he's 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. you're 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 it's interesting to note that obviously some presidents have a lot of scandals and some presidents don't 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 presidents, 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 presidential 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 presidents who had two terms, you can see some interesting dimensions in most cases, presidents had more scandals in their first term than their second term. and this is sort of not what's 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 don't trust as much or maybe aren't as looking out strong, looking out for your interest. so you see some changes. what's also interesting is that you see here some of the more impactful scandals though in the second term. so reagan with iran-contra, iran-contra, 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 let's about what these scandals look like. so like i said, mostly they tend to be kind of financial, personal and sometimes political. they're 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. iran-contra fits here.

so they don't 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 don't see it that much. but there is a category there. but if you're a president and you're sort of stuck in this world, you have to decide what you're going to do when you're confronted by scandals. you have to take some kind of strategy. and so over time, we've seen presidents 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 presidents might approach how to get out of a scandal. and so to our sort of big question we've 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, presidents can try to sort of game that a little bit. and they mit do this in one of two ways. so you might see a president who is very forthcoming in term what happened during the

scandal. so you see kind reagan and one hand, you know, very kind of and e her is sort o 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 let's talk about the the cases where presidents might stonewall. so i put nixon here as a good example, is one of those situations where he stonewalled everything. i don't want anyone to know anything about what's happening, but other presidents 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 let's talk about what this is. so what does it look like? a president stonewalls a scandal? well, one of the things that we know is that presidents are basically going try to limit

how much informati out. so withholding information, shunning blame or attempting to evade consuences. this might meain practice delaying informal being released, releasg information just a little bit at a time or sometimes not at all, providing informati to investigators, not cooperating with other institutions like congress, or maybe the justice department, or sometimes deflecting blame with a partizan attack. this is a favorite one right here. right. talking about how well, this is just a witch hunt, like it's, you know, the case that the media are out to get me or my enemies are ganging up on me. so that's in some sense stonewall. and so the question then is kind of what factors to consider in this context. well, so obviously that's situational and like we said earlier, the scandals matter and that are very degrees because of these circumstances. so the first thing to consider is what's the likelihood the truth is going to come out? is it the case that there's a really good chance this is going to become public, if not, then you can take a different

strategy. so one of the things we find is th the lower the probability the truth is revealed, the more likely the president is to stonewall. right. i mean, this is what you do with your parents, right? if they're not going to find out, then i'm not going to say anything. makes total sense because in that sense, you want to make sure, you know, you limit the damage and presidents are the same. the cost of the opposition. so think about this. if the cost of pursuing that hostility is high, then it's going to be aware on your white house. and so what we find is that when you have higher the cost of continuing the hostility with the media, with congress, then presidents more likely to stonewall. the third is that the cost of continuing those hostilities, if it's the case that yourpproval ratings continue to drop or if you the real prospect of being impeached, whichs a more common scenario the last several years thant has been before, that then the presidents are going to alter their ability to or alter their actions. so t higher the costo presidents in terms of the

continuing, the more likely the president is to cooperate. so they want to make sure that like, they don't have the worst case scenario happen. so i want to walk through a couple of examples of how this works, what the set up looks like, then what the conclusion look like. so here's bill clinton from this famous speech that he gave immediately after the lewinsky scandal broke. now, just give you a little of a history lesson here. you've got the drudge report, which was kind of one of the first sort of online kind of news gossip sites. they the story that says the president had an affair with an intern this is something that, you know, for bill clinton wasn't like out of the question right he certainly this this before right had been accused of having affairs before but not like this and so was easy for them to deny, which is exactly what the president did here. so here's a clip of that. but i want to say one thing to the american people. i want you to listen to me. i'm going to say this again. i i did not have sexual relations with that woman, miss

lewinsky. i never told anybody to lie. not a single time never. these allegations are false and need to go back to work for the people. thank you. so everything he said there was a lie, right? except the going back to work for the american people, which actually is a great piece to bracket because we'll talk about that a strategy, too. but obviously he did have a relationship with her. it was clearly a sexual origin and obviously he got nabbed for it. another way to look at this is that cover up can be about kind of how you prevent information from being released. and so this clip from nixon during the nixon frost discussions was part of it. so just to sort of walk back in terms of where this in history after nixon left office, he agreed to a series of interviews with this famous journalist. and so they talked through all these different things, including all the watergate details. this is a clip of him talking about how.

this is not a cover up, even though historically it clearly was my motive was not i did not believe that we were covering any criminal activities. i didn't believe that john mitchell was involved. i didn't believe that for matter anybody else was. i was trying to contain politically and that is a very different motive from the motive of attempting to up criminal of an individual. and so there was no cover up of any criminal activities. that was not my motive. so nixon says i'm not covering up criminal activity. i'm covering up the political problem that related this. it's still the same problem, right? still stonewalling, regardless. so this classifies as stone, too. not you can hear it again. it doesn't more true. all right. so if you look at this over time, you can see, not surprisingly, that president are

more likely to stonewall if the scandal involves them. so you can see in almost 80% of the cases where there's some potential for stonewalling, presidents tend to do so. the number in percentage is a lot lower. if you look at cabinet members, agency heads or other appointees, it's between 40 and 50%. so you can see a massive drop off in terms of strategy here. right. again, if the president's involved, there's a good chance it's going to get found out. but if other people are involved, it might not register. and so the likelihood is lower of it being discovered and therefore you see the lower likelihood of them telling a truth about it, the less least amount of stonewalling if it's a nominee or the first lady for a nominee, you can just cut him loose, right, to say, hey, sorry, made a mistake. we're not having you anymore. for the first lady. i don't know how to read that. i guess it's because the first lady can't be, like, just sort of ignored. that's not done. it could be that it's the case that they simply, you know, they simply like consider a family

and off. so it's possible that's what's happening but not totally sure but let's talk about sort of the conditions in which they're likely to stonewall so i gave you some kind of theoretical moments where we're likely to see presidents stonewall not and just to kind of recap and extend some of things you can see here, the kind of probability that a president ll stonewall or not based some of those conditions. so obviously, like i just showed you when the psident's involved there, 40% more likely to stonewall if the andalous political than they're 73% more likely to stonewall. this is the nixon scenario, what did he say? i'm not coring up the criminal tivity. i'm covering up the political mess. well, that's exactly what we see here and basically, he pros this point in the cable tv era post 1981, you see presidents are less likely to stonewall. it's inresting because the ki of implication is that they're more likely get caught. you've got more news networks have got more reporters, you've got more people digging, you' more likely to get caught. so the prediction is that you

stonewall less and actually or you do and so it's exactly what we find. we also see divided government in the similar position. if the president confronts, an opposition congress, they're more likely they're less likely to to stonewall. and so that's a big finding, too and actually good for kind of democratic interactions where you'd like to see the kind of probability go down if there's going to be a chance that they're going to get found out. and that inter-party friction, which we'll talk all about next week, is going to be part of that story. so i want to break this out even further and talk about one particular scandal. and it's instructive because this is a scandal where there's really two parts. so this is the iran-contra scandal. do you all have a sense of what this was? this gets into the weeds. yeah. okay. okay. so buckle up. this is a stunning scandal. it goes across a couple of different kind of dimensions of domestic policy and foreign policy. but really, i want to highlight two features. the president.lly one involves

one that 't. so the scandal takes place in the second adminion of ronald reagan, 85, to 86. the first part of the scandal uncovers a covert pof as sales to iran. this is aimed at convincing moderate elements in ira assist efforts to relee american hostages who had been right.n iran for years. so this is basically like a sort of foreign policy goal from the president. this was authori president 1985. the second part of the scandal, ough, wt there was an exposition of a cover up of his covert policy. the contra rebels in nicaragua. so it's a separate policy issue. this is basically, like we said last week, we talked about the reagan doctrine, which was to try to limit the spread of communism in south america. well, one of the ways that they did this was to funnel covert money to groups that were trying to fight some of the people who were promoting. so that's the second part of the scandal. they're not related in terms of policy, but the iran-contra issue merged them together. so that's why it's a weird merger of things, right?

iran and the contras are two different continents, but this is why it's sort of one big scandal. this second part was illegal because congress forbid. and so basically this is the president around congress illegally. that's the scandal. so just a note. when the president not involved in the scandal, which as i said, was wide ranging, they cooperated. the national security advisor, john poindter, resigned, and iver, who was necessary to counsel, is fired. president reagan, a special commission headed by former texas senator john tower. and then an independent counsel, requested the white house investigate the wrongdoing of the nsa, and the white house cooperated. so basically. here's a situation where on this parts the president was not involved in. they were willing to cooperate and give other branches what they wanted. so here's reagan from a speech saying more or less exactly that for the three months i've been silent on the revelations about iran and you must have been thinking why d tell us what's happening.

why doesn't he just speak to us as he has in the past, when we've faced troubles or tragedies others of you? i guess we're thinking, what's he doing hiding in the white house? well, the reason haven't spoken to you before now is this you deserve the truth. and as frustrating as the waiting has been, i felt it was improper to come to you with sketchy reports or possibly even erroneous statements, which would then have to be corrected, creating more doubt and confusion. there's been enough of that. i paid a price for my silence. terms of your trust and confidence. but i've had to wait as you have for the complete story. that's why i appointed ambassador david absher as my special counselor to help get out the thousands documents to the various investigations. and i appointed a special board, the tower board, which, on the chore of putting the truth together for me and getting to the bottom of things it has now issued findings. i'm accused of being an optimist

and it's true. i had a hunt. pretty hard to find any good news in the board's report. and you know, it's well stocked with criticisms. i'll discuss in a moment. but i was very relieved to read this sentence. the board is convinced that the president does in deed, want the full story to be told, and that will continue to be my pledge to you as the other investigations go forward. i want to thank the members of the panel, former john senator john tower, former secretary of state muskie, and former national security adviser brant scowcroft. they have done the nation as well as me personally a great service by submitting a report of such integrity and depth. they have my genuine and enduring gratitude. so here see reagan bragging right about the things they did to comply all these document all this time staff are available all this is the white house cooperating the three months but

things are different when the president is involved in a scandal like we said we should expect to see a change of strategy, which is exactly what we see. so in cases where presias involved, you see them stonewall. so john poindexter and and admiral casey here argued against discloref the arms sales to protect the president. that is, again, this is illegal. congressai no, the white house did it anyway. well, if put the president in the middlef is, that's an impeachable offense, no question. so they argu ainst it as much as they could and they far less got their way north. and poindexter shredded documents athesc. this is sort of famously part of this scandal, destroying the presidential finding tt authorized t iranian arms sale. so it does not exist in the special prosecutor. obvislcan't find it, but ha edence that it happened. the administration did not allow for the declassification of material needed to prosecute oliver north. so in some cases they cooperate. in some cases they stonewall. here is. reagan talking about that second

part lot about the staff of the national council in recent months. and i can tell you they are and dedicated government employees who put in long hours for the nation's. they are eager and anxious to serve their country. one thing still upsetting me is that no one kept proper records of meetings or decisions which led my failure to recollect whether. i approved an arms shipment before or after the fact. i did approve it. i just can't say specifically when, but rest assured. there's plenty of record keeping now going on at 1600 pennsylvania avenue, so now we're keeping track. do you all believe him? did you get the sense that i mean, this is the great communicator right we talked about reagan is one of the better at communicating his position to people. but in this case, he had to do a lot of gymnastics to get there. you guys convinced persuaded that some skepticism. well, i don't blame you and

because we know the strategies involved, it gives us a sort of flavor for how presidents are handling this. right. so when look at how presidents are trying to kind of maneuver around a scandal, think about this, because it'll give you a sense of what the strategic kind of questions are. but even the scandal happens and the ways presidents react isn't just about kind of what legally they're on the hook for, but also kind of what happens in terms their bigger political impacts. we've talked a lot about the ways presidents use their tools to try to accommodate congress and try to push their own policies ahead, sometimes without acting with, sometimes acting alone. and so the kind of way the presidents handle their political business after scandal is also relevant to thinking about the ways that they get around the scandals. so two different options. presidents engage when it comes to a scaal either they can kind of go big and do a lot more or tn do a lot less. now, sometimes they can do this on their own. sometimes they have to have . so just two ways to think about

this. son the summer of 2013, the white house was confronted with several different scandals and the chief of staff, denis mcdonough, indicated that they expected the white house to spend no more than 10% of their time on these controversies. i thought that was interesting because he puts a specific number on it and to me, this is a stunning way to be able to kind of identify exactly what they expect to have happen or not happen now, contrast that with governor sarah palin when she was in office, before she was picked to be the presidential ninee for john mccain she mentioned that the troopergate scandal, which involved a staff lawyer and kind of a relationship with one of her with one of her family members, the process cost about $2 m for the state. and, of course, somee. and what she saw at the time was that this distracted the staff from doing the real work of the state. and so either these scandals matter a lot and hurt the white house's ability to be able to act and operate or they have no effect. it just kind of glances off their back so we can track to

see what presidents do in these kinds of scandals. so, you know, how should presidents react? they're confronted with these scandals. i did not pick this picture of monica lewinsky on. it was like one of the first that showed up. but she looks really unhappy in this. this is one of the times that she's being deposed during the clinton lewinsky scandal. so how do presidents react to the kind of political of things? well, one of the things we know is that if you aggregate the scandals and all the sort of attention presidents give to these various tools, you can see some interesting patterns. what presidents do is they spend more time giving smaller speeches like around the country. they have more public appearances in that same vein, and they enact more determination, which are like unilateral foreign policy items. one of the things they do less of is major speeches. so really presidents kind of play small ball here, really go local. they try to kind of build the up their kind of credibility, kind of like community by community basically they don't go big and have major because there's a larger tendency for them to get kind of batted down.

we talked weeks ago about how presidents generally speaking or trying to keep it local because it's where they're getting better, more favorable coverage, the same is true here. it's just of a different. the other thing we know is that when presidents give speeches, especially state of the union speeches, which they have to give. right. they can't not give one because there's a scandal so they have to give the state of the union speech. so it's actually a perfect opportunity for us. see? okay. what are they talk about in a state of the union after a scandal well, here's what they do and it's totally predictable. they actually talk more. and so they have bigger speeches, longer speeches. so this is the reg drawing of the number of sentences. so you see more than 75 additional sentences. the other is that they are spending more time talking about economics, education and welfare issues. so they really pivot the things people care about. and that's not surprising, right? considering that this is something that makes them look bad in public. so they want to try to repair their public image. here's a pursuit, a new

strategy. so here's an example of this, where this is a president who bill clinton giving his of the union speech right after the lewinsky scandal breaks. and so congress considering impeachment, he has to do something to try to dissuade them potentially from that, but also be able to kind of regain sort of credibility of the office. so here is his reaction. this slice. have pursued a new for prosperity, fiscal discipline to cut rates and spur growth, investments in education and skills, in science and technology and transportation. to prepare our people for the new economy, new markets for american and american workers. when i took the deficit for 1998 was projected. be $357 billion and heading this year, our deficit is projected

to be $10 billion and heading lower. for three decades, six presidents have come before you to warn of the damage deficit that's posed to our nation. tonight, i come before you to announce that the federal deficit once so incomprehensibly large that it had 11 zeros will be simply. zero. so there's a lot of applause there. right, including like newt gingrich, who's the speaker of the house, standing right behind him, who's leading efforts to impeach him.

right. but it's something about economics and the sort of success, the economy that definitely promotes a kind of unity in government and. even when you're in the midst of a scandal, it can be something that's useful for presidents. and so here we see president clinton sort of pivoting to a slightly different issue, trying to get around the scandal. but that begs the question about whether or not a scandal can hurt you. legislate actively. now, one of the things we've talked about is that basically that scandals tend to polarize just like a polarizes, you know, people who are nfl fans of the patriots not. and so it's worth asking how this sort of manifests for them. so just to give you a kind of summary of this, over the course of the full data set from the 1970 to 2, i just cut it off here that 2012 you can see here the black bars, the number of scandals, cumulative, an administration. so they kind of add up over time the graph that's. the gray bar is about the support from the senate. then the dotted line is party

unity. so you would expect to see party unity increase because you've got essentially both sides sort of leading to their own camps. and you also would expect to see sort of, you know, support waver, because if you're a president in trouble, maybe it's the case that the body decides to abandon you and your issues. and in the case you're not able to be as effective as a leader legislatively. so you can sort of see some differences here. it's hard to make it sort of out because there are of different sort of things that are happening all at once. but i want to give you a kind of summary of what we find. so one piece of sort of summary detail is that we actually see party unity increasing. and i sort of expect this like i mentioned, you see this for both in partizans out parties. so when a president has more scandals of their administration as add up, you tend to see democrats voting more with democrats and voting more with republicans. now this is happening consistently over time anyway. we actually talk about this next week, but we also see this when scandals punctuate. so one of the things this does is to lead to more polarization. so you're seeing basically

scandals lead to additional kind of legislative polarization, which has other implications for how to get around it. so it's one thing that we can kind of the other thing we can identify is that scandals actually are more damaging to republican presidents, especially in support. actually, the only type of president who loses in congress or republican presidents, the same effect is not true for democratic presidents and some explanation for this is basically that for republicans, they expect a certain kind of level of, you know, moral purity. and this is related to the sort of foundations, their support among more, you know, more christian individuals. we've talked about this in the course of the last 40, 50 years. so it's possible that's what's happening here. but in any case, there's certainly something we've seen be a prominent feature in how the presidents are different in that way. so just to give us a kind of summary before we dig into like what's happening?

why is this all happening? i want to talk about when scandals have a limited effect. so like i said, you know, it's not the case that scandals are always impactful. they don't have a big impact. what a great example is. you see john sununu, who is the chief of staff for george h.w. bush. he was caught using a military plane to fly home to new hampshire. this was something that was sort of totally catchable, like he wasn't trying to hide it. he you know, figured it out. he broke the rules. sorry. he apologized and then put you paid the fee basically to sort of have the cover, the cost of it. this is one of those scandals that just comes and goes. not that interesting, not that impactful had no ramifications for the president or for the staff. and th iactually somewhat common for most low level scandals. government proceeds largely as bunees. usually there really aren't that many differences. most scandals are brief involve a few people and basically either lead to quick resignation or people forget. we do see.

like i mentioned, though, that on some key legislative votes and for total support that really there's no significant effect in terms of legislative skill. so scandals don't have a big effect on the ability to pass legislation. they just don't. for presidents who are republican, sometimes we see a lack of party unity. there may be some abandonment there, but overall, honestly, there really isn't a significant effect in terms of legislation. so in a way, that's good news because if these scandals debilitate the system and hurt the president's ability to act, then it could lead to a bigger impact in terms of governing. but we actually don't see that in most scandals. but there are some scandals where you do see them having a major impact on governing. so when are those? well, we certainly see both presidents and i throw in governors here because governors are like chief executives of their states. they do respond aggressively to revelations of scandals both large and small, and they adopt their adopt behavior to sort of accommodate. so i showed you some examples of how that was true. polarization increases a little

bit. we also see the system react in interesting ways. one of the things we see is that there are more hearings, congress to probe wrongdoing. so we can track basically after a scandal. does congress increase the number of hearings? and they do so they are checking to see if there's anything else that's happening. the other thing is that we see internal agencies in the executive branch doing more audits and reviews finances to make sure there aren't other problems that are lurking. and so any scandal can trigger this. and so it's good thing to see government responding in a way that makes it so that, you know, we're checking that there aren't any further problems. okay so what are we talking about here? ultimately, the consequences of scandals can be pretty wide. but i've tried to give you some consolidated views of how this typically over the past 50 years has happened in cases we see congress reasserting its power now we've talked a lot about how presidents are trying to expand their power, but we also see times where ngss has tried to react to that. so during like watergate, we saw

this was true during during the vinawar. we saw congress doing this. so there are those moments where congress try to claw back power an scandal are one of those cases. sometimes the public just accepts that behavior and that can lead to changes. so one of the reasons scandals may not matter as much anymore is that, you know, people are more accommodating of these things. they're not as, like, willing to punish certain politicians for some kinds of actions. sometimes that leads to key resignations. media scrutiny, sometimes tougher ethics laws. i didn't talk about this, but in some work. you see basically sometimes you'll see state level legislation to increase the kind of rules at the state level to limit how scandals happen in the future. so that's a useful way to react to scandal. see, like, let's let's make sure this doesn't happen anymore. and finally, it's possible that like nothing happens. literally nothing happens because scandals in cases just don't hit like used to. but the question then is like, why? i mean, like we said a lot, we

live a polarized world where the kind of interaction between and democrats is changed and you don't see scandals mattering, at least for some people, versus or in some cases for other people. they say that these scandals, the worst things to ever happen. why is this the case? well, some reasons why this is the is that essentially scandals aren't deal breakers for a lot of people. some scholars have found that when you look at this, you can see that basically the public is not as concerned about scandals. they used to specifically. it's partizanship, partizanship can limit the negative effects of scandal if your preferred candidate is caught in a scandal, it doesn't bother you. but if the opposition candidate is cotton scandal, it's the worst thing you've ever done. right? and they should never be allowed to be near the ballot box so that partizanship limits the ability to kind of have accountability in a scandal. so in that sense, the scandals are less impactful scholars. have also shown basically that the efct of scandals is pretty

sht lived and, flees really quickly. and so in scholarship what people do is like an experiment where, you know, you give people a hypothetical scandal and, then a couple of weeks later test them again and a couple of weeks later test them again. now, at first, of course, people are like, oh, that's bad, don't do that. and two weeks later it's like, okay and then two weeks later after that, they're like, what the remember we met. so those are obviously sort of give us a sense that this life of scandal is really short and so you don't see those being. so that certainly has an effect. another way this has an effect is that basically, even in scandal, ideology holds. so for presidents, if you're worried about making sure your base is happy, that's the key. the scandals are not going to be impactful because the people who like like you for reasons that aren't related to your personality or things like that. and so candidates who ideologically proximate are still favored despite the scandal also. frankly, it's the case that and

i'm sure none of you think this way, but it has been the case that if you see your opponent in a worse political position, it makes you happy, right? you like you like your opponents to suffer a little bit. so i'll talk about this in a second. but basically, candidates who promise to pass policies that disproportionately harm supporters of the opposing political party are. and so there is this kind affective polarization, right, where know if your group is hurting. and my group. okay, i'm happy with it. right. it makes me pleased. we call this political shot and freud. where like we take pleasure in other people's other groups we don't likes misery. right? so i use this as an example here. a lot of stuff about hunter biden, right? this is why it's become such a kind of commonplace story. right. is that having other people sort of suffer, especially the opponents politically suffer, is something that makes you pleased.

it makes you happy. and so that's part of it. but like said, the root of a lot of this is about partizanship. and when you have partizanship effect scandals, it means that they're not going to be as impactful as they otherwise would be. so a couple of things to note here. a couple of my colleagues did a really interesting study. they basically did a survey experiment where they asked about donald trump's acquittal, his second impeachment, and what found was that support for the acqutal was largely static. and then the partizansp was strongly influenced whether the public accepted, the veracity and importance of the of the political information. so people who liked donald trump were good with the acquittal. people who didn't thought it was bad and wrong. so, again partizanship manifests in something really important like impeachment. and impeachment is like one of the only ways we have to really legitimately presidents accountable. so that limitation obviously is restrained by partizanship in the other component of this is that anger sells if you're a candidate, if you're a

president, you are happy to see anger as of this because you can rile up your base a really strong, fast way. right. so, for instance, not to sort of hit on the hunter biden point again, but it tends to pop up if you google for hunter biden, this is all of what shows up. so here's basically my kind of universe of of of pictures. it's this sort of the greatness of it and the kind of, you know, that that sort of the of complexity here certainly sort of reflects the fact that this is something that the, you know, kind of opponents of hunter biden in president biden are trying to, like, promote. right. it's just sort of a commonplace activity and it works. so what people have found is that exposure to angry and partizan politicians significantly, the amount of anger, disgust and outrage expressed by experts trust by coach rank and file partizans. so basically, if you see anger in one sort of condition, you're more likely to sort of express it yourself. so it reinforces itself over

time. so again, the more we can make people unhappy, the scandals are just exacerbating that partizanship the other component of this and so we've been talking a lot about the ways that, you know, the presidents basically operate within this political system. and so the way scandals manifest sometimes is not just related to what individuals do, but also the way that you see the other branches act and. one of the things we've seen is that the supreme court basically has loosened laws that describe tribe what bribery is. and sohis actually gets to a case involving governor mcdonnell from virginia. the he was convicted of bribery in a very sort of pronounced public way. he lives literally accused of taking gifts from wealthy donors. he was like had pictures taken of him like in a ferrari with like a gold rolex watch. and they had him dead to rights. the question wasn't much did he do it? it was whether the context that it was a gift to him or whether it was a bribe. well, the supreme court this up

and basically says that what constitutes an official act is still unclear in most and so the court basically undid the jury's finding that this was bribery and it said, in fact, we really know what it is, but it's not bribery because you didn't prove that. so as a result, you're seeing a lot of overturning of some of these scandal cases. and thiss st a lg y of saying that for those people who have beenoncted, bribery, like members of congress, i reference here and other sta leslors the fact that they have to have different instructns for what nstutes, bribery and in some cases you might see like prosecutors not choosing to prosecute, it means that you're seeing scandals sort of less than we used to. and so as a result, the supreme court has a lot to say in terms of what is and is not scandal, but more back to kind of thinking about how we as citizens process political the trust in the media is a huge component here in pcur

it's to some degree asymmetric conservative trust in the media has really cratered. so looking at some details from various organizations is from pew. what they find is that only 35% of republicans today say they trust national news organization compared to 70% in 2016. that was not very long ago. conservative trust, a national organization, has fallen by 14% since late 2019, compared to single digit drops during each year during the trump era. so that is a serious decline and it's contributing to the inability for us to decide kind of what scandals are important, what's not important in a nonpartisan if you look at the details here, pew, you can see clearly that we as a country are getting our news from different sources. republicans from one democrats from another. so democrats here, mostly from cnn and nbc, republicans from news and abc. so that means that in some cases people live in different media ecosystems and that's creating

this inability for us agree on like what is a scandal and therefore how a president handle it. so in searching for these i found thishich i thought was reallytunning. newt gingrich's three rriages mean he might make stng president. really? i didn't read the article. so i don't ow how. but the headline says it all right. that we live in a different world, right? we live in our own media ecosystems where partizanship guides the day. we also know that elites still matter. right. speaking of sort of partizanship in the news, here's tucker carlson, who's very prominent clearly on the conservate side. one of the things people have found in looking at this is that a jump in scandal related tweets by one group affects the volume of other tweets. so basically what happens is when you see something about an opponent, you're more likely to retweet it. right? and so what this shows is that, you know, over the long run elites basically drive supporters to more of these things rather than the other way around. so there is still a kind of effect where whatever the elites are saying is a problem

politically, is now something that we see more and then share more of. and so that top down relationship continues. and that, of course, exacerbates some of how these things go. so for instance, now you can do things like create these movies about the kind of scandalized son of the president. the other factor is that all politics are now national. and one of the ways we know this is that you're seeing the decline in the percentage of the kind of electorate who's thinking about the politicians, local sort of connections. so matt grossman, who's at michigan state, tweeted this out from a a symptom scholarship that he had called, where basically it shows that that you've got a nationals nation of elections so local factors such as incumbency candidate quality candidates spending barely registered in comparison to partizanship and presidential views. so again, like you're seeing

basically people care about national politics and less local politics. and as a result, you're seeing these things magnify on a pretty big scale right. obviously, the sort of george santos phenomenon where despite being literally indicted and having like all these bad things said about you, you're sort of continue to manage to survive. so to sum up, scandals are less impactful in a modern era for the following reasons partizanship misinform fewer institutional nets. we have our own media ecosystems, lower trust in the media and nationalized politics. all this is leading to is sort of story where we can see since we have data from the seventies to the present, how this manifest so is sort of sort of showing my work. this is our this is a an in our statistical analysis but. let me summarize it for you. basically, one of the things we can do is to look to see how

long scandals last and the degree to which other factors limit, how long or short they are. so this gives us here is a measure of in a polarized era beginning in 2000, two scandals, a long gate, or are they shorter now? if scandals matter more, we should see them getting shorter, right? that is we catch you and you quit. there are longer you stonewall, you try drag it out. you appeal to your partizans and try to survive in office. what we find here is basically that the polarized era we see the likelihood of presidents surviving significantly higher. and, you know over time the curve sort of exacerbates that. so basically likelihood of a person surviving in office is higher when the in the more polarized era. so again, this sort of reinforces our sense that this is sort of a more kind of unique phenomenon, right where we are now. and that's something that's potentially troublesome. ce slightly more serious eras

negative consequences from than those in later eras. hereee ithe background bob menendez. so you probably paid som attention to, right? senator menendez, who ha bee snagged in the legal net for potentially accepting br congressional bill, just to give you a sense of kind of what the ngressional gubernatoriale, scandals in the watergate era led to more resignations, but fewer resignations of white e officials during the administration. federal executive officials survived in office at rates greater than the past era, but still,als ded. correctional. so it's sort a trump thing. the trump era definitely shows that some of those officials and the president held on for longer than in comparative cases in prior eras. so there is some support here for this sort of trump effect, where donald trump kind of changes the nature of the way scandals affect the public. so what's going on with this

largely dumpster fire in american politics? well, like we said, basically, people live in their own sort of media ecosystem and like the information that we get overwhelms us. so we don't ow wh's true and not true. so in some cases, a lot of people have sort of given up in terms trying find out what the truth is. and that's something the partizanship is exacerbating. so one of the things we find, sue, in sort of scholarship more broadly is that, you know, more people are comfortable siding with their political tribe. if everything's up for grabs and it's hard to sift competing narratives to find the truth. and there's nothing left but culture war. politics, it's sort of us versus them. and persuasion is really hard. so for presidents, they face this all the time. they're trying to negotiate some kind of a resolution to a piece of legislation. but it's also the case in times of crisis, presidents are having trouble in negotiating because people don't trust each other. and the two opposing sides can't agree even what's a scandal. and so as a result, it tends to

create this potential problem. the base kind of likes it. we talked weeks ago about fundraising and fundraising is something that even a scandal hurt. so here's a bell. here's a here's a headline from the hill. basically, trump's fundraising increased after he was indicted. the first time. so that's pretty stunning to see as an outcome. right. another way to look at this is if you at historically we do a lot of our work right and you guys do your papers and some the other assignments in terms of what the past white houses have done. well, here's an interesting memo from the watergate era. this is from dave gergen, who became a kind of sort of celebrity presidential counselor to haldeman, who was a chief of staff for president. there's a lot in this, but what he says effectively here, the blue arrow is, is that the president needs to rebuild public confidence. and this is basically a year before nixon resigns that one of the first steps is for his senior people to begin rallying behind him, showing that they have such confidence.

that's totally lost to view. now, as we are transfixed on stories of watergate crumbling and desperate men pitch walking each other in the night. so in addition to being well-written and funny, like it's certainly true where you are seeing effectively the white house trying to do damage control on how to make this happen. the presidents know that it's not over till it's over. right. here's a young president who's a young president. nixon, before he was president, basically saying after he lost the gubernatorial race that he was going be out of politics. well, that didn't stay very long. so even people who are fictionally accused of crimes can survive them, if all watch the west wing. i've talked this a little bit here and there, but do you remember when president bartlet was accused of a scandal? right. he basically misled the american people that he had a disease, he had mms and didn't disclose it. so even fictional presidents can find a way around this. and so there is like a whole story where basically there's a concern the president going to

get impeached for this. certainly took some political lumps, but the question remains how presidents survive a scandal. we've talked in the past actually, you see here in the background, president obama wearing the tan suit right. this became kind of like a controversy not a scandal because it doesn't qualify, but obviously political friction in some is magnified and that we see how that effect on the political system. so you can certainly see this impact how congress or how the president sort of deal with this. so obviously here, you know, again, here's another kind of watergate era memo. a couple of months after the one i just showed you. and this is a situation where they did a whip count. and so they're trying to figure out, like, where they stood in terms of congress. so just kind of summarize it. basically, they're looking at people who were definitely with us and definitely against and then people who are leaning with us and of leaning against us. and so even up to, you know, literally a few months here, president nixon resigns the white is concerned about where they stand in congress.

another way that they ask this question is whether or not the president can still govern. i found these at the reagan library. and so one of the things that they did in the reagan administration was to pose these alternatives for people, you know, do you like x or do you like y in this case? they asked during the heat of iran-contra whether the president could still govern. so in one case, they say this sort of hypothetical. miller believes that the iranian incident shows president reagan may have made mistakes, but it does not raise questions about his ability to run the country. brown, on the other hand, believes the incident shows reagan's not in control of the presidency and therefore raises serious questions about his ability to run the country. well, you can see here that there's not much change overall. generally speaking, people believe like miller, that the president was still able hold the white house effectively and do their job realistically well. this is, again, of the way that presidents to game this. right. they try to see like what's the outcome here, what's the strategy that and, you know, to

get out of this? and what do people feel so to kind of summarize this, how do we handle scandal? now, presidents, like we said, have confronted with all these different opportunities to, be able to try to get out of scandals when they come. what should they do? so thing they can do is to rally the base. we know that works, especially in a modern sense. get the truth out early. get good lawyers. this is a good example and good advice generally, but certainly in a scandal worth doing, internal damage control. make sure that you've got everyone in your team on the same page. make sure the information is boring. if there's no excitement, there's no scandal, try to keep it still just boring. no one's talking about it. and finally, keep president. one of the things we said earlier that was important for presidents is to try to kind of to something that people like and. so keeping on track in terms of legislation, in terms of your policy is key.

finally, make it one news cycle. try not to keep it extended. the longer it goes, the more it hurts. okay, so how do we not handle scandal? i use nixon here as a good example of this because obviously almost everything the nixon administration did was in terms of our playbook. number one, don't try to change the subject. it's too hard. people want to talk about it. they're going to talk about it. number two, don't get defensive or indignant. that means that people think lying. and finally, the cover up is worse than the crime. here's nixon's problem right? if you try to cover it up, it's going to make it worse and you just dig yourself deeper and deeper in that hole. so presidents found this out the hard way. and so why do these scandals matter? well, at the end of the day, basically, it's about accountability and so we've said that presidents obviously have to navigate around these different crises. sometimes they make them sometimes, you know, they have to just work through them for presidents and confronted scandals. it's important not just in terms how they do their job, but also what says about the full political system. and that's really been a

hallmark of what we've tried to convey in our class. like, how do presidents navigate this complicated set of arrangements that the constitution provides? it requires so accountability matters here. right. so it's not just about the president and sort how they can govern, but that matters, obviously, in terms of how things move, but also in terms of the bigger picture if scandals don't matter anymore, accountability is hurt because then we don't have the ability to hold people to on these things that they have done wrong on. and so some findings here are really interesting in this and instruct live and helpful so a couple of my colleagues did a really cool where they look at randomly house members and what they found was that if you got selected as somebody who was going to get the audit then you were more likely to retire than who wasn't. and he also those folks face more elections. so what means is that when people get watched, when there's

more digging than increases and you see that become like an ongoing and so this is good news for the public and for the system because if people pay attention and start to really what's going on, sometimes they don't like what they see. and as a result, you see the scandal or potential creating more competition in a different work. what people also find that you n actuay encourage people to pay attention to the things that matter in scandals. and so work was sort of basically randomly assigned certain republicans to see more trump ssia headlines. and what happened was that they reacted mo negatively than democrats or independents rating performance lower and expressing more negative emotions about him. so we talked a lot about the way that like living in our own world is a problem. you don't see what everyone else is seeing and so having a kind of diverse media diet critical. and what we find is that when people have that diverse media diet sometimes don't like what

they see. and so that limitation also prevents there from being, you know, kind of this, you know, kind of whole kind of, you know, sort of putting your head in the ground and sort of just ignoring some of the things that are happening. it's also helpful that guardrails form inside parties to save the party from itself, establishing new rules and trying to vet candidates a little bit better is useful. and so parties have a big function here in terms of trying to protect democracy, which in some cases not what they're designed to do. right. they're designed to promote kind of partizan interests and unify people of like minds inside government and outside government parties also have a role here in terms of trying to, like, prevent bad actors from engaging in the political. so in that sense, then, scandals are good, scandals help and we would like to see more presidential scandals for that reason alone, right? because we want to see more accountability and more interactions like that. but the big picture, of course is that, you know, we care about how presidents function. government and scandals can limit that ability. but it also has implications for

the larger political system. so it's important to keep in mind how these things all flow together. all right. good. we are done. anybody questions or comments about any of this? now is your chance to be on camera. what do you think about the sort of sense scandals don't matter anymore that partizanship limits the ability for scandals impact people? and we don't agree on like what's wrongdoing anymore. what do you think about that idea? agree. disagree. yeah. hold on a second. they're going to come you're going to get you have to talk directly to the boom. mike. so scandals don't matter or do they? you tell me. i think they do matter. but the problem is the public are now they don't care. we are overwhelmed with apathy

and. yeah. like they don't even know enough to care. and they don't even. and if you tried to tell them so it's like it's happening. we notice it, but we forget it. the moment that next is up. yeah. so it's like we're just waiting for the next high. so it's a great point. yeah. yeah. and if we don't like kind of have agreement on what's a problem, then it's impossible for us to remedy that and change the rules to make sure they don't happen because nobody likes it when happen. it's never a good outcome, but it's definitely something that presidents will like to avoid. and it's possible that if we all agree these things are bad, we fix it. it doesn't happen anymore. yeah, good question. good comment. yeah. yeah. other thoughts? it's your chance to be on camera. yeah. there you go. yeah. so so the scandals still matter or not? yeah. question well, let's see how those. okay.

i don't know. well, mine wasn't, like so much of a question about that or comment about that, it was just not like when scandals do happen. i see a lot of like presidents like reagan and, like clinton, kind of like it's not like defer it like nixon did, but kind of just be like, well, i just want to go back to being president. i want to go back to doing that. and and they really, like, acknowledge the scandal too much. they just kind of like, you know, just put like pass it off and show more of their positive deeds. and i think that's like i feel like in like a comparison to that, like kind of like in a relationship, you're like cheat on the other person, but you're just like, okay, well, like that happened. i can't do anything about it, but i just want us to go back to the way things. yeah, like it doesn't really work that way. you got to have to, like, at least acknowledge the fact of like what? just happened. i don't think that presidents really do that. good, good. good point. yeah, like apologies for wrongdoing are so modest now. yeah. you don't see a lot of it. yeah. and i'm not sure it works. and so it's a good point. yeah, i know for like political reasons they can't really

outwardly be like, hey, this was what i did was wrong because that would just like ruin their chances of reelection or just like, yeah, you just accountability and everything, but, like, i feel like it is just like a toxic mentality sort of thing. it's a great point. do you think if presidents apologized after scandals that it would be like, welcome apology? yeah i'm wondering, actually, we actually know the answer to this question, but it's a really good one because like you expect it sort of in a normal situation, somebody apologizes for what they did wrong and you forgive them. but what do we see? the same level of forgiveness across partizanship? i'm not sure. yeah, a lot. i take that from being substantial. so the fact that you apologize if you're confirmed and that you've made a mistake in that office should not even do in the first place. yeah, that's a bad luck. apologize. yeah. you don't know. yeah, exactly. i wish we knew more about this, but because i'm curious to how like contrite this plays into the survival element of it, right?

because if you knew, you apologized and, you would have forgiveness across the aisle. then presidents would do it all the time. but i'm not sure we see that. rarely do they apologize. i clinton eventually right. for the lewinsky scandal. but like you rarely see presidents apologizing like directly. i'm sorry i did this. yeah. good point. yeah. other yeah in. oh, hold on a second. yeah he's got he's going to shift the camera so as like hunter biden scandals a lot of them like the president can apologize for them because like that's like a different person. so like when they found cocaine in the oval office or like when, you know, the whole thing with foreign policies like with him in china it's kind of hard to apologize for other people's actions and i think and that circumstance like like at what point do you realize that they're related each other and like maybe he should apologize for those actions and i think if he did apologize for them, i

think the apology would be, you know, not well taken, like you said. yeah, that's really interesting. yeah. like on some stuff, you can't apologize because it's like admitting guilt and maybe you don't think you are guilty. so you wouldn't see it. but like on a personal scandal, you might see more often because that's the scenario where it's your wrongdoing and. apologizing for it doesn't implicate you legally, but it's a great question about whether it would be accepted or and which would be accepted or not. think it's a really cool question. yeah. other thoughts. all right. all right, well, good. we're done. thanks for like accommodating. we'll have a break. so you won't me next week unless you're at cougars game, in which case i'll see you there. otherwise