Oh, is this ‘the biggest scandal,’ Mr. President?
Speaking to reporters earlier today, President Trump demanded that the media cover what he called “the biggest scandal in the history of our country.”
No, it wasn’t that the sitting president is relentlessly cashing in on the presidency or that the sitting president staffed his administration with unqualified cronies or that the sitting president and his administration have subverted Congressional spending authorization or that the sitting president is systematically undercutting the Constitution and rejecting checks on his power as he pushes toward authoritarianism. It’s that the president two presidents ago, Barack Obama, “led a coup.”
Barack Obama did not “lead a coup” against Trump, of course, as I wrote a few days ago. What Obama did was serve as president during a period when Russia was seeking to influence the results of the 2016 election in Trump’s favor. That influence effort overlapped with Trump staffing his campaign with a number of Russia-sympathetic actors, mostly because he was still seen as sufficiently toxic by the Republican establishment that relatively few legitimate consultants and advisers wanted to work with him. The probe that began under Obama included consideration of Trump’s potential complicity in the Russian effort, but Trump’s disgust about it seems more securely rooted in the idea that he only won because someone else put their hand on the scale.
Instead of rehashing what I already wrote, though, it’s useful to instead recognize why Trump is deploying this hyperbole at the moment. Trump offered this narrative about a devious Obama and his allies specifically in an effort to redirect the press’s questions about Jeffrey Epstein. This wasn’t subtle; Trump specifically told the reporters that they “ought take a look at that and stop talking about nonsense,” meaning Epstein. Why focus on his relationship with an accused sex trafficker when you could focus on the biggest scandal in history?
The proper response isn’t simply that the allegations against Obama aren’t a scandal at all, much less the largest. It should also note that Trump has repeatedly identified other things as the “biggest scandal” in history — at times when he’s trying to redirect attention away from something he doesn’t want to talk about. In November 2019, for example, he responded to questions about the ongoing impeachment probe by suggesting that the real scandal was … wait for it … the Russia probe.
Points for consistency on that one, at least. But here are a few other “scandals” which Trump has, at some point, described as the “biggest” he’d ever seen.
Oct. 30, 2016. Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server as Secretary of State
“So the 33,000 that she deleted and bleached, I think she gonna be in the 650. But how do you have that many emails. What do you do? Sit down all day and just keep on typing? Hey, no wonder, nothing gets done in our country. This is the single biggest scandal since Watergate.”
April 25, 2019. The investigation into Russian interference
“This was a coup. This was an attempted overthrow of the United States government. … This was an overthrow and it’s a disgraceful thing. And I don’t — I think it’s far bigger than Watergate. I think it’s possibly the biggest scandal in political history in this country.”
July 14, 2020. Hunter Biden working for a Ukrainian company
“Remember, where’s Hunter? People forget all about that stuff. If that were ever me, if that were ever me, it would be the biggest scandal in history.”
Sept. 27, 2020. His campaign being ‘spied on’
“This is a major scandal. This is a scandal, the likes of which nobody has ever seen. This is actually the biggest political scandal in the history of our country. And with the exception of a few, I mean, they just don’t want to write about it. You should read about that, Kelly, you know. You should write about it. You should write about it. You should do something on CNN about it, because it’s the biggest single scandal of our time; certainly the biggest political scandal, perhaps, in history.”
Oct. 9, 2020. Mail-in voting
“They’re sending out millions and millions of ballots. Are they sending them to all Democrats? Who are they sending them to? Where are they going? You know, etc., etc. This is going to be the second biggest political scandal in history” — behind the Russia probe.
Oct. 16, 2020. The Biden family’s businesses
“Here we have the biggest scandal going on anywhere in the world, the corruption of Joe Biden and the Biden family, and he’s interviewed last night by a Stephanopoulos on ABC and they don’t even ask him the question about it.”
March 22, 2021. ‘60 Minutes’ not showing a full answer from Kamala Harris
“The other big news is the fraud committed by ’60 Minutes’ and CBS, together with the Democrat Party, working together with them, which will go down as the single biggest scandal in broadcast history, I predict.”
July 29, 2023. The Biden family’s businesses
“They took in millions. But so much more money pours in. And Joe, he knew all about it. It was a big lie. That was the big lie. This is the biggest scandal in U.S. history and perhaps the world.”
July 9, 2024. Covering up Joe Biden’s decline
“Joe, Kamala, and the entire Democrat establishment have been caught red handed in the thick of the biggest scandal and the biggest cover up. It’s a cover up. That’s what it is. I said it when they hit this guy in the basement and then they cheated on the election.”
Oct. 25, 2024. That hundreds of thousands of children are ‘missing’
“The fake news media doesn’t even talk about it. If that were a Republican instead, it would be the biggest scandal in history. It would be the equivalent of nothing else, and they don’t even talk about it.”
July 16, 2025. Biden’s use of an autopen
“Whoever operated the Autopen had a policy, which is by the way, I think the biggest scandal. That’s the scandal they should be talking about, not Jeffrey Epstein. The scandal you should be talking about is the autopen.”
Honestly, I’m starting to think that the president might be prone to exaggeration.