Contender

 Gary Hart lost his bid for the Democratic Presidential nomination in 1988 because he was lying about an extramarital affair. He dropped out in May, 1987 just a few weeks after the scandal broke wide open. Of course none of his behavior was any sort of secret. Stories of Hart's womanizing trailed after him for years before like toilet paper stuck on his shoe. That kind of stuff would float for a senator, but apparently not for a presidential candidate. 

Bill Clinton was impeached because he lied to Congress, and the rest of the planet, about his affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. Sure, there was other stuff, but ultimately it came down to a guy who lied about having sex outside his marriage. It's the kind of thing that could get you impeached back in 1997. Richard Nixon, who was by all accounts a very faithful and dutiful husband, was never impeached. There are different standards for cheating on your wife and cheating in politics, apparently. 

Which brings us to the guy who lived his life a lot like a sleazy real estate version of Hugh Hefner. Donald "Juan" Trump didn't make much of an effort to scrub clean his philandering before he went ahead and took that escalator ride into infamy with his third wife. After spending a few decades making the legend of himself seem real, he wasn't about to bury that one. But when it came to things like his tax returns, that was none of our collective business. We were asked for six years to take him at his word that there was nothing to see there. It was all on the up and up. 

Not really. This past week, after years of wrangling, those documents that all previous presidents including Dick Nixon and Bill Clinton made public finally saw the light of day. In 2020, Donald and his third wife Melania paid no federal income tax. On seventy-eight million dollars of income. On top of that bit of creative accounting, he then claimed a five million dollar refund. 

I understand that math has never been this man's strong suit, but this seems to lie just a little outside the arithmetic mistake. Despite claiming ridiculous amounts of loss and expenses, the former game show host insists his tax returns "show how proudly successful I have been and how I have been able to use depreciation and various other tax deductions as an incentive for creating thousands of jobs and magnificent structures and enterprises.”

Which doesn't keep him from complaining bitterly about their release. He insists “the Democrats should have never done it, the Supreme Court should have never approved it, and it’s going to lead to horrible things for so many people." Those many people were not available for comment. 

Meanwhile, newly elected Representative George Santos, Republican for New York's third congressional district is no doubt busy now fabricating stories about the way he has remained faithful to his wife whom he divorced in 2019 while he remains "openly gay" and is "jew-ish" rather than Jewish, and all those properties he and his family were supposed to own turn out to be the room his sister lets him stay in at his house. Ladies and gentlemen, I think we've got ourselves a contender!