Tarriffgate hasn’t happened yet. At least nobody is calling it this. However we could say Trade-Wargate has been engaged.
Related to Trump’s tarrifs, another “gate” could be Stupidgate:
Another “gate” that shows indications it may be around the corner is Muskgate.
With the market cratering 1000+ points this morning (article) we now can consider a pending Recessiongate.
My life partner and intrepid proofreader added Stagnationgate.
Some horrors may not lend themselves to a short “gate” term but still have a grim ring to them. A good example is Starving-Childrengate.
How about Bird-flugate? For that matter, if we have more than one disease reach epidemic or pandemic levels we could have Diseasegate we can blame on Trump and RJF Jr.
With enough excesses in Trump’s manic sadistic quest to punish his enemies we could have Police-Stategate.
A lot of these don’t have the simple one word “gate” name which we can thank a Washington, DC building complete for:
When the Signalgate story broke, I wrote Trump survived Pussygate unscathed. Will he survive Signalgate unscathed?
The term Signalgate was used in only three articles that night. By the next morning it was everywhere.
One has to be careful about labeling something a “gate” too early. You can run a “gate” up the flagpole and see if anybody salutes and hope that if it doesn’t turn into a damaging scandal people forget you predicted that it would.
Wikipedia has a list of some 800 gate scandals (here) most of which never went anywhere.
Aside from Watergate, which brought Nixon down and sent people to jail, there are two other famous ones. Emailgate might have contributed to Hillary Clinton losing the election. Pussygate proved that not enough people cared that Turmp was a gross disgusting sexual assaulting misogynist to keep him out of the White House.
So far Trump is the only politician to have had two gates: Pussygate and Signalgate. He survived the first and is so far well along the way to surviving the second.
I predict that the gate that may yet hurt him is Tarriffgate. Trump may have put way too many of his eggs in one basket with his tariff war.
Read my previous Substacks here.
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