From the Gary Hart campaign torpedoed in 1987 by his adulterous love affairs to the imprisonment of Anthony Weiner in 2017 for intimate photos sent to a 15-year-old minor, the sex scandal could pass for an American specialty.
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The ingredients are certainly universal, but the United States seems to have made a specialty of a Puritanism which would forgive almost all politicians, except infidelity or amorality - on the grounds that it reveals the profound character of the person. This thesis, which could no doubt have been defended until Donald Trump, has however taken the lead in the wing with the current president.
From the origins of American democracy, rumors and scandals have been in the political chronicle. At least two of the founding fathers, Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson, maintain extramarital affairs which make people talk, the first with a married woman, the second with a young slave. From Andrew Jackson to John F. Kennedy via Grover
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