Do Political Scandals Matter Anymore?
The sagas of Herschel Walker and Ryan Zinke show that partisanship is the driving mechanism behind the GOP’s post-Trump voter allegiances.
It was an unsurprising October surprise. Trump’s handpicked Senate candidate from Georgia, the former football star Herschel Walker, was alleged by a former girlfriend to have paid for an abortion in 2009—and then purportedly asked her to get a second abortion two years later. The woman produced proof of her claims: a receipt from the abortion clinic, a get-well card signed “H.”, and a deposit slip with a copy of a signed check from Walker.
Confronted with the allegations by fellow polymath, the Fox News host Brian Kilmeade, Walker said he had “no clue” about the woman’s identity or her claims. But Walker continued to change his story, eventually acknowledging that he knew the woman and gave her money, but claiming the check was not for an abortion. It was later revealed that Walker had been ordered to pay child support (a paltry $2,500, then $3,500, per month) to said woman in 2014, and that he’d been making those payments on time.
In a pre–Donald Trump election cycle, Herschel Walker’s career would be over. Instead, anti-abortion groups like the Susan B. Anthony List have rallied around the candidate who literally paid for an abortion. It was like the saga around Trump’s Access Hollywood tape and countless debacles since: Republicans took a beat, and then decided they didn’t care. Power is the only value this post-policy Republican Party cares about.
“Nothing matters” was a common refrain during Trump’s time in office. Every scandal that hit the Trump administration did nothing to dislodge the loyal MAGA base. The very few wrongdoings that led to consequences stand out. (Remember when, in July 2018, EPA chief Scott Pruitt resigned under a hurricane-force cloud of ethics violations, including using his position to help his wife get a Chick-fil-A franchise? Pruitt was very much an exception to the rule.)
Ryan Zinke—who, in August, was found to have intentionally misled federal investigators during his tenure as Trump’s interior secretary—resigned in late 2018 amid a flurry of investigations only to reemerge with Trump’s backing as a 2022 congressional candidate in his home state of Montana. Pre-Trump Zinke might have slinked off into the sunset. Post-Trump Zinke is not so different from Dr. (Mehmet) Oz, the TV doctor and Trump-endorsed Senate candidate from Pennsylvania whose recent scandals include killing puppies for research, touting questionable health products, and voting in the 2018 Turkish presidential election.
Trump’s time in office was like a sea of Watergates, minus the blowback. Every day brought another scandal; stuff that could have—would have—ended another administration barely made a dent. Impeachments, family separations, nepotism, self-dealing, “a culture of self-enrichment,” and more were met with a dull shrug and cries of “but Benghazi” from the GOP base. From Republicans’ dismissal of the Access Hollywood tape to Republicans’ dismissal of the January 6 insurrection, the entire Trump presidency and its aftermath have been an exercise in desensitizing the right to scandal and creeping authoritarianism. Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that conservatives circled the wagons around Herschel Walker too.
Republicans have made clear that they value partisanship more than policy or principles. Trump once said he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue without losing voters. What I don’t think I realized until now was that this level of bald depravity has desensitized the GOP base.
For a long time, I thought Trumpism couldn’t scale. I thought that the MAGA base’s nonchalance wouldn’t hold without Trump at center stage. Now I’m not so sure. Partisanship has become the driving mechanism by which the core of GOP voters vote. Partisanship has eclipsed everything else; to a lot of these voters, nothing matters but the letter next to each candidate’s name.
During the four years of Trump’s administration, the Republican base was trained to accept the unacceptable—to support their guy, because the other guy was somehow worse. Every scandal made the MAGA core of the party more intractable when, in normal life, it would have done the opposite. We won’t ultimately know until the midterms are over, and all the votes are counted, whether the latest string of GOP scandals have had any effect on the candidates in question. But it’s pretty easy to guess where all this is going. Of course, I hope I’m wrong.