United States of Scandal with Jake Tapper returns for its highly anticipated second season. With direct conversations with those involved, the series delves into some of the most infamous and bewildering scandals of the modern era. Over six gripping episodes, viewers will revisit controversies that have left a lasting impact on politics, sports, pop culture and corporate America.
We spoke with the host Jake Tapper, CNN Anchor and Chief Washington Correspondent, about the upcoming season and what viewers can expect.
For Season 2, what was your approach to selecting the different scandals you cover, and what common threads bind these cases beyond their sensationalism?
We wanted to get outside of politics this season. Season 1 was very focused on governors, presidents, senators, etc. For season 2, we wanted to widen the aperture of the camera lens and look at other fields, including society, business and sports. This resulted in some scandals that are no less interesting but also outside Washington, D.C.
The show has a "beyond the headlines" approach. While interviewing the various subjects, were there things you discovered that you didn't know previously?
The whole point of the show is to look at a scandal that has happened in the past and is basically over, with distance, with perspective, with all the facts. So, we can cover it in a way that is not just the drip, drip, drip of daily news. We can look at how and why that scandal happened and what it was truly about and its long-term meaning, if any.
We always want to talk to the actual players. During scandals, it's usually impossible to talk to anybody. They won't talk to the press, or if they do, only talk to sympathetic people, or they will wait years. For this series, because time has passed, we get an opportunity to go deeper with some wisdom and insider accounts. For example, I was able to speak to Floyd Landis about the Lance Armstrong scandal. One could argue that Lance Armstrong's biggest sins were not necessarily doping, but things he did around doping to conceal what he was doing.
In your Rolling Stone interview from 2024, you noted that "shamelessness" is now a political asset. How does United States of Scandal address the normalization of once-unthinkable behavior?
Well, I think that's just the context of the show. When you're doing a show about a scandal that took place 10 years ago or even decades before, it's important to ask what it looks like in 2025 given our devolving norms and standards.
How do modern scandals in the social media era differ from earlier ones (pre-social media)?
Social media has created these echo chambers where people on either side of the political aisle have a built-in support network. Even Woodward and Bernstein said that if Fox News had existed during Watergate, Nixon might have survived. He would have had a channel of support behind him. I think that is part of the difficulty of being a journalist today. Look at Trump's cabinet. There are a lot of people who, 10 or 20 years ago, would not have been confirmed because they wouldn't have had that support network. Look at Governor Cuomo, running for mayor of New York. I find it hard to believe that 20 or 30 years ago, a disgraced former governor who resigned because of sexual harassment scandals, not to mention serious questions about health care policy during COVID, could be favored to come back and win. We're in an era where there are such echo chambers that surviving scandals is eminently possible.
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