Politicians Who Ruined Their Careers On Live TV

Billionaire Warren Buffett said it best when he once stated, "It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it." It also might explain why the tycoon never caved into the temptation to dive into the political snake pit, one that yields a multitude of scandalous secrets, as well as a slew of unlucky candidates who failed to crawl their way out of that contentious crater. Questionably, the likes of Donald Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene seem to have somehow avoided that perilous freefall, although the list of like-minded colleagues who fell short is a lengthy one indeed.

However, for all his brilliance, Buffett miscalculated the effects of technology on how someone's credibility can be wiped out in seconds, thanks to the leaps and bounds made by communications tech. While social media is touted as the preferred forum to witness career-ending gaffes committed by politicians, live TV still offers an occasional ringside seat for folks to catch a lawmaker say or do something damaging enough to change one's status from hero to zero. Whether it involved a politician denying his culpability in the mother of all scandals or a British statesman hosting Yuletide parties during a pandemic lockdown, evidently the camera never lies. Here's a look at a few pivotal moments these personalities wish they could take back.

In June 2015, when former Florida Governor Jeb Bush threw his hat into the Republican ring to represent the party as the country's next president, he quickly became the front-runner. That month, an NBC News poll had him as a clear favorite, grabbing 22% of the tally. At the time, Donald Trump barely registered at 1%. Eight months later, Bush packed it in, unable to catch the tailwinds that vaulted Trump into a commanding lead. Some pundits blamed pedigree for the ill-fated campaign, given that Jeb's father and elder brother, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush, were both controversial presidents when in office. "He starts life as a political meme, because he comes to the digital world dragging his family behind him, his analog family story behind him," noted Encyclopedia of Social Media and Politics editor Kerric Harvey to NPR. "He cannot be separated from his own narrative."

More telling was Bush's message failing to captivate Republicans. Unlike Trump, whose plainspoken, albeit insult-laden, verbosity attracted a growing base of admirers, Bush was hardly an inspiring orator. Trump even picked up on his opponent's weak execution, calling him "a very low-energy kind of guy," per Vox. That telling moment before the cameras summed up just how badly he was doing with his own crowd. In one instance, after his explaining his take on national security, which went over with not even a hint of applause, Bush added quietly, "Please clap."

By the time William Jefferson Clinton was elected president in 1992, he was already deep in scandal. Whitewater was the biggest, when Clinton (then governor of Arkansas) and his wife Hillary teamed up with two fraudulent investors in a venture that went bust. He was also still scrutinized for previous alleged affairs with the likes of Arkansas public employee Paula Jones and singer Gennifer Flowers. But the one accusation Clinton couldn't dodge involved the surfacing of a salacious incident with White House intern Monica Lewinsky in 1998. Leaked by the Drudge Report in January of 1998, the story threatened the credibility of the president, prompting him to tell Americans on live TV, "I did not have sexual relations with that woman."

By August, after his grand jury testimony concerning the affair, Clinton admitted he lied about the affair and that he did have an intimate relationship with Lewinsky. "I know that my public comments and my silence about this matter gave a false impression I misled people including even my wife," he said on a live TV broadcast. "I deeply regret that." By December, the House of Representatives impeached Clinton for obstruction of justice and lying to the grand jury, although an acquittal from the Senate two months later let him off the hook. Even though Clinton survived that impeachment and completed his second term in office, he would continue to be haunted by that televised lie for years after.

During the summer of 1988, polls indicated that Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis had a commanding lead over Republican nominee George H.W. Bush to succeed retiring President Ronald Reagan. In response, the electoral team assembled by the hawkish Bush – Reagan's former vice president and one-time director of the CIA – decided to hammer away at Dukakis' stance on curbing military spending, thus making the Democrat look weak on national defense policy. That's when the Dukakis brain trust decided to stage a photo-op of their guy riding an M1 Abrams tank at a media conference to counteract the assertion. The demonstration was a fiasco as Dukakis — who also sported an oversized helmet — was dwarfed by the tank.

"Everyone around me in the press corps was doing the same thing, either laughing or pointing or looking at each other, like, "What's this? How can he do this to himself?" recalled former ABC reporter Sam Donaldson to FiveThirtyEight. The Bush team cobbled the event footage into a successful ad that turned Dukakis into a laughingstock and eventual loser in the presidential race. Looking back years later, Dukakis agreed the tank stunt was a bad idea, although he thought it would help his platform for a more gradual buildup of the military. "I was at the tank factory to make that point, obviously," Dukakis said to U.S. News and World Report. "Now, should I have been in the tank? Probably not, in retrospect."

Arguably the most infamous American scandal began in Washington D.C. in 1972 when authorities caught a gaggle of wiretapping operatives breaking into Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate Hotel, uncovering a trail of conspiracies that led to the White House, in particular President Richard Nixon. Despite mounting evidence, Nixon defiantly maintained his innocence. "I'm not a crook," he declared on live TV in 1973. "I earned everything I've got." But a release of tapes recorded in the Oval Office confirmed Nixon's complicity in the Watergate scandal, leading to his resignation in 1974 before Congress was about to impeach him.

Leaving his post in disgrace was one thing; public ridicule that haunted Nixon until his death in 1994 was another. Nixon's infamous "crook" speech morphed into a comedic cottage industry, as entertainers like satirist David Frye, impressionist Rich Little, and "Saturday Night Live" performer Dan Aykroyd gleefully mocked the president's distinctive voice and appearance, while humor publications like MAD Magazine regularly caricatured Nixon's visage. Years later, shows like "Futurama" and "Last Week Tonight" continued that lengthy tradition. "Perhaps no other modern president has been impersonated, parodied and portrayed so often, and why not?" wrote CNN contributor Todd Leopold, months before a similarly-ridiculed Donald Trump became president. "The brilliant and tragic Nixon was positively Shakespearean: jowly, with a swooping nose, guttural voice, unfortunate grin and overeager victory-sign pose, combined with the mind of a chess player and the eyes of an obsessive." 

Legendary football running back Herschel Walker made quick use of his feet to scramble for more than 8,000 yards during his years in the NFL. But with one of those feet firmly planted in his mouth, Walker didn't garner much distance while running for Congress. While running for senator in Georgia, the Republican hopeful committed plenty of gaffes, including an attempt to market his more erotic side while speaking at a rally in Toccoa. "Guys, I'm 220 pounds of twisted steel and sex appeal," Walker boasted (via PatriotTakes), oblivious over the number of times sex has brought down many a politician. When allegations surfaced that Walker had paid for two abortions, an issue universally scorned among Republicans, the candidate flatly denied them. 

But it was on live TV during an interview with Fox News op-ed host Sean Hannity that Walker most likely blew his chances for the Georgia seat. Flanked by Senate powerhouses Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham, Walker had the chance to air his thoughts about his bid to win the post. "First of all, this election is more than Herschel Walker, this erection is about the people," he said, in a slip of the tongue that caused his two colleagues to quizzically look at him. The embarrassing mispronunciation garnered lots of mileage everywhere from a guffaw on "The Tonight Show" to a hashtag trend on X, formerly known as Twitter, and was a major contributor to Walker losing that election in the December runoff.