Presidential scandals
It’s a long and colorful history
Donald Trump keeps telling us he’s the “greatest” of all U.S. presidents. He says he had the biggest inauguration crowd ever, that he’s singlehandedly stopped eight wars and that he would have solved the COVID-19 pandemic if he’d had more time at the end of his first term. He also probably thinks he can claim owning the greatest presidential scandal of all time, but he would be wrong.
In order to have a scandal, you‘re supposed to do it in secret and try to keep it covered up like Nixon’s Watergate. Trump doesn’t get it; he does all his wheeling and dealing out in the public. A good scandal requires elements of sleaze, shame and public denials. But, when it comes to shame or having a conscience, well, Trump is really not that great. What do you think?
To have a loathsome-worthy scandal, somebody usually has to go to jail, like Oliver North did for his “bag man” role in the Reagan era Iran-Contra Affair. Trump and his sons keep making millions and millions in foreign land deals, rare mineral contracts, cryptocurrency swindles and serial emoluments from foreign governments like a $400 million airplane from Qatar. But nobody is being threatened with jail time, did you notice?
Before all the current efforts by Trump to turn The White House into his private cash register, Nixon’s Watergate escapades to wiretap the Democratic Party’s headquarters and get the CIA and FBI to hide all the “smoking gun” secret tape recordings was considered by most historians to be the greatest presidential scandal of all time.
But there are many other historians who still point to the much earlier Teapot Dome scandal that took place during the 1920s presidency of Warren G. Harding as the “greatest.” That’s because, following a long, long history of presidential scandals, it wasn’t until the Teapot Dome scandal that someone actually went to jail.
Scandals older than dirt
Our United States is now 250 years old and it’s a good bet the trail of presidential and political scandals is just as old. One of the oldest and often mentioned “scandals” happened over the 1825 presidential election, eventually won by John Quincy Adams. That election ended in a three-way tie between Adams, Andrew Jackson, and William Crawford. The scandal took place when Adams’ father, former president John Adams, made a secret deal to trade for votes in the House of Representatives-led runoff in exchange for naming two men to his son’s cabinet. Loser Jackson called the whole thing a “corrupt bargain.” No one went to jail, however.
Just a few years later, after ascending to the presidency, Jackson was party to a political scandal of his own that became known as the “Petticoat Affair.” Jackson led a very “rocky” tenure in the White House. Like Trump, he did many of his more contentious actions out in the public, in willful defiance of his many political foes, including the rich bankers and railroad men he bucked.
The “Petticoat Affair” was as lightweight as the name might suggest. It involved circles of cabinet wives ostracizing the very young wife of Secretary of War John Eaton. By the time all the backbiting and political shenanigans subsided, Vice President John Calhoun and half of Jackson’s cabinet secretaries resigned, clearing the way for Martin Van Buren to win the presidency in the next election. Imagine what other power shifts might have happened if there had been a Stormy Daniels, Trump’s porn actress, mixed up in the middle of the Petticoat Affair.
It seems whenever sex wasn’t involved in one of history’s presidential scandals, wheelbarrows or slush funds full of cash would be at the center of the controversy. Before Trump, one of the best “shakedown” artists was President U.S. Grant who took money “donations” from whiskey manufacturers for relaxing tax laws on their products. Before there were bitcoins or cybercurrency, Grant made “inside” deals with several rich businessmen involved in gold trading. This scandal earned a name in parts of the muckraking press as Grant’s “Gold Ring.”
So far, all of the scandals laced with sex attached to Donald Trump’s name happened before he became president, even though he’s the only sitting president to own a guilty verdict for sexual abuse. John F. Kennedy, as we all learned after his assassination, was a serial womanizer that snuck several women in and out of the White House during his short three-year term.
Our 42nd president, William Jefferson Clinton, was not as lucky in his sexual affairs as Kennedy and was still alive when he got caught and was impeached in 1998 for lying to Congress about his dalliances with intern Monica Lewinsky.
It never rose to the level of being a scandal, but do you remember when president Jimmy Carter, a lifelong Sunday School teacher, got into trouble for confessing to sometimes having “lusting in his heart” in a Playboy magazine interview? Compare that with Trump’s bragging on the Access Hollywood tape where he says he “grabbed (Hollywood starlets) ‘em by the pussy.”
Trouble with the Constitution
The Founding Fathers certainly had the potential of corruption, scandal and despotism on their minds when they drafted the U.S. Constitution in 1789. They included a clause where Congress could impeach a sitting president for treason, bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanors. They also wrote that a president “shall not receive … any other Emolument from the United States, or any of them,” meaning from other sources and especially foreign governments.
But, in another section of the Constitution, the office holder of the presidency, is free from all the codes of conflict of interest that all other federal elected officials and staff are subject to. The Founding Fathers didn’t want their future commanders in chief to be potential victims of blackmail attempts.
Much more recently, on July 1, 2024, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, 6-3, that a sitting president has “absolute immunity” for any acts committed within his core responsibilities and by, or under, official acts. In Trump’s case this includes such non-scandals as stealing classified documents, eliciting an insurrection against Congress on Jan. 6, 2021 or ordering the deportation of a U.S. citizen or the killing of noncombatant individuals on the high seas.
This recent Supreme Court ruling may make Trump and future presidents immune from most scandals, but it also brings them closer to the level of being an infallible king. Indeed, Justice Sonia Sotomayor concurred in her July 1 dissent, “The relationship between the President and the people he serves has shifted irrevocably. In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law.”
The Teapot Dome scandal
That wasn’t the case in the 1920s when President Harding’s Interior Secretary Albert B. Fall accepted bribes from oil companies to secretly lease federally owned oil fields in Wyoming (Teapot Dome) and California. Harding was cleared of any wrongdoing but his reputation suffered and when he died in office in 1923, his name was still under a dark cloud. After lots of newspaper investigations and Congressional committee hearings, Fall was finally convicted for bribery and sent to jail in 1929.
It was a half century later beofre any other “president’s men” were sent to jail for their parts in a scandal. Attorney General John Mitchell and White House aides H.R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman all went to jail for obstruction of justice, conspiracy and perjury for their roles in the Watergate cover-up.
During the 1992 Iran-Contra affair where Reagan Administration operatives took secret funds from the Iran government and illegally diverted them to buy weapons for the Contra rebels in Nicaragua, 10 men including Secretary of State Casper Weinberger and National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane were indicted. Most of the accused and convicted men received pardons from incoming president George H.W. Bush, but Oliver North, McFarlane and John Poindexter all served jail time.
Now that Trump and his supportive Supreme Court enablers have all but normalized presidential scandals, we may never see another White House staffer or Cabinet appointee get sent to jail.
Silly us, for ever doubting the veracity of Trump’s taunt that he could shoot a person in the middle of Fifth Avenue and get away with it. Maybe the real scandal is we all gave him the ammunition he needed.
— Rollie Atkinson
7-5-2026