Commentary: From Nixon to Trump -- How scandals reshape power, not justice

The American political system flatters itself with tales of enduring resilience. We are told that each scandal is a crucible, a test from which the republic emerges tougher, wiser, and better fortified. The institutions bend, the story goes, but they do not break. The narrative is comforting because it suggests that corruption is always self-limiting, that crisis is always purgative, that turmoil survived is justice fortified.

But the record tells another story. Scandal after scandal has not made American democracy sturdier. It has hollowed it out, teaching the powerful not restraint, but ever-shrewder ways to transgress.

The evolution is visible if you trace the history. Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal remains the model of collapse, the last time a president was truly broken by his excesses. Nixon sought to prove that the antiwar movement was supported by foreign enemies, a paranoia that led him to create a secret “plumbers” unit when the Justice Department refused to do his dirty work. When the cover-up fell apart, Nixon still assumed that the system was larger than he was. He instructed his staff to cooperate, surrendered the tapes that destroyed him, and finally resigned. His downfall was celebrated as a triumph of constitutional order.

But in practice it became a negative lesson. The mistake, his successors concluded, was not the abuse of power but Nixon’s submission to the process. He had played by the rules of the very order he had tried to subvert. That was the error, in their mind.

Ronald Reagan and his circle proved this in the Iran-Contra scandal. Reagan’s team openly defied Congress by funneling money to Nicaraguan contras and secretly trading arms with Iran. When exposed, they stonewalled, obfuscated, and wrapped themselves in patriotic language. The investigations dragged on, responsibility was diffused, and in the end no one went to prison. Oliver North, far from being disgraced, was lionized as a hero and nearly rode his infamy to the U.S. Senate. George H.W. Bush then erased even the possibility of accountability by pardoning key figures on his way out of office. The real moral was obvious: Push hard enough, resist long enough, and power will bend in your favor.

Bill Clinton’s impeachment reinforced the drift. The charges against him were less about high crimes than about the raw exercise of will. What should have been a constitutional moment of reckoning became instead a partisan brawl. Clinton’s party circled the wagons and he emerged not as a chastened leader but as a survivor, fortified. The system had not disciplined him; it had shown itself as just another arena of combat, where victory belonged to whichever side refused to yield.

George W. Bush carried the lessons forward. Where Nixon had relied on covert operatives, Bush legislated his transgressions openly into permanence. The Patriot Act and mass surveillance programs institutionalized practices that would once have been unthinkable and his officials misled Congress and the public and the whole world with impunity. What was once a scandal became normalized governance, bureaucracy absorbing abuse until it was no longer visible as abuse at all.

Barack Obama, elected on a wave of reformist hope, chose not to look backward and punish those who had openly abused and molested the system. He declined to prosecute Bush-era crimes, from torture to warrantless wiretapping, effectively ratifying the new status quo. The message was unmistakable: Even a president who campaigned on transparency would not disturb the machinery of impunity. The same machinery to which he bowed again when his Justice Department indicted not a single executive that contributed to the collapse of the financial system and the nation’s (and the world’s) sinking into a great recession.

Donald Trump, of course, perfected the post-Watergate playbook. Where Nixon resigned, Trump never yielded an inch. He refused subpoenas, branded oversight a witch hunt, and treated shamelessness as strategy. Impeached twice, he emerged not weakened but emboldened, his party more tightly bound to him than before. His refusal to concede the 2020 election only sharpened the pattern: In American politics, defiance itself has become a form of power.

And Biden: Well, if Trump was going to make a mockery of the system, Biden was certainly not going to be the naive fool, was he, his supporters declared. And so he issued 4,245 acts of clemency during his four-year tenure – more than any president before him– among them several for members of his family (including one for his son Hunter Biden, who was pardoned for any and all acts dating back to 2014, for which me may otherwise be pursued in a court of law).

Seen chronologically, the pattern is unmistakable. Scandal is no longer a rupture that cleanses the system, an opportunity to plug a hole or patch a breach. It is instead repetition that teaches. Each event mutates into precedent; each precedent normalizes a tactic; each normalization becomes the ground for the next, deeper breach. Rather than antibodies, the body politic produces new strains of corruption, each more resistant than the last.

Why does this keep happening?

The answer: Because political actors in America have an extraordinary degree of discretion.

Representatives, elected in the delirium of the partisan fevers that grip the electorate every election cycle, are barely bound to the will of their constituents – or even that of their base, beyond the handful of red meat issues. They operate instead as autonomous operators, free to interpret, maneuver, and negotiate in ways that serve first and foremost the party, donors, or their own ambitions rather than the public. This wide latitude gives them room not only to act but to evade. The system trusts them to be restrained, and when they are not, the scandal becomes a contest of strategy rather than one of accountability.

Imagine a different order: One where representatives were avatars of their people, tethered to the mandate of those they serve, without the discretion to maneuver in service of faction or career. In such a system, scandals would be rare, because misconduct would be obvious and swiftly punished. And when they do occur, the lessons would strengthen democracy rather than weaken it, because representatives could not treat oversight as a rival to outwit, but as an expression of the people themselves.

Instead, we inhabit a politics where scandal hollows the system further each time. The myth of resilience blinds us to the reality of corrosion. Every crisis teaches not humility but impunity, not caution but technique. And as long as political actors remain free to act as executives rather than as proxies, every scandal will be less a moment of cleansing than a rehearsal for the next violation.

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Ahmed Bouzid is the co-founder of The True Representation Movement.

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