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The 1980s sex scandal that explains TMZ’s move to DC

How a senator’s downfall paved the way for Donald Trump.

The newest journalists running around Capitol Hill are none other than reporters from TMZ. The celebrity gossip site, famous for its aggressive and sometimes unsavory — but often effective — newsgathering tactics, opened up a Washington, DC, bureau just last week.

TMZ’s expansion into congressional news promises even more celebrity-style coverage of politicians. (For example, TMZ founder Harvey Levin recently asked the public to send pictures of lawmakers doing anything but their jobs during Congress’s spring recess.) But this brave new media landscape and its consequences date back further, to the 1980s. The clearest example is that of Colorado Sen. Gary Hart, an oft-forgotten politician once considered a frontrunner for the 1988 Democratic nomination for president, who was forced out of the race by allegations of an affair.

Rolling Stone columnist Matt Bai, who wrote a book on the Hart scandal titled All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid, tells Today, Explained co-host Noel King that Hart was right about a lot of things to come in politics, including getting the leaders we “deserve.”

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full episode, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

Gary Hart in 1987 was the far and away leading Democratic contender for the presidential nomination [in 1988]. It all went away in one week in what was the first modern broadcast-era sex scandal in politics.

He was said to be having an affair with a woman who was not his wife, and that he spent a night with her on a boat and then had her in his townhouse. He was followed by reporters from the Miami Herald who hid in the bushes on his street and followed him. It all made for great drama and his political ambitions in that moment imploded and his political........

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