Summer Friday: Why Do We Call Every Scandal “-Gate”?
It all started with a hotel
Happy Friday, and welcome to the first edition of The Preamble’s Summer Friday newsletter! To give us all a little break from the news, every Friday from now until Labor Day, we’ll answer questions on the big topics that really keep us up at night, like “Why do we eat popcorn at the movie theater?” and “Why are barns red?” — you know, the serious stuff. This week, we’re uncovering the origin story of the linguistic quirk that gave us Zippergate, Deflategate, Bridgegate and so much more. Dive in below, and feel free to leave your own questions in the comments! We might use one for a future edition.
—The Preamble team
In May 2011, a married New York congressman named Anthony Weiner accidentally tweeted a photo of his crotch in tight gray boxer briefs to all of his Twitter followers. He had meant to send it as a DM to a 21-year-old woman — not his wife — in Seattle. Weiner deleted the tweet within minutes, claimed his account had been hacked, and spent the next several days telling the press, with a straight face, that he could not “say with certitude” whether the underwear in the photo was his. Ten days later, he tearfully admitted it was and resigned from Congress. Given the congressman’s name, this whole sordid episode could’ve been called many things — but what did the press name it? “Weinergate.”
More than a decade later, a far more serious texting scandal would get a “-gate” of its own.
On March 11, 2025, Senior officials in the Trump administration — including JD Vance, Pete Hegseth, Marco Rubio, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, and then–National Security Adviser Mike Waltz — were on an encrypted Signal group chat called “Houthi PC small group.” The group was coordinating airstrikes against the Houthi militants who had been attacking commercial ships in the Red Sea and lobbing missiles at Israel in retaliation for Israeli strikes on Gaza. Waltz, who coordinated the chat, accidentally added the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg.
For four days, no one bothered to ask who “JG” was inside the chat. Hegseth shared details about the timing of strikes and what kinds of weapons were being used. Goldberg quietly left the chat on March 15 and then wrote an exposé on the details.
And, of course, the press named the incident “Signalgate.”
From an infamous sexting debacle to a war-planning group chat, we’ve now slapped “-gate” on the end of countless scandals across politics and pop culture: Weinergate, Signalgate, Nipplegate, and the list goes on. It started with Watergate in the 1970s. But how did a building in Washington end up having its name attached to nearly every act of misconduct in the United States — and occasionally abroad — for the last half century?
The short answer: a burglary, a humor magazine, and one very prolific newspaper columnist.
It started with an actual building
The Watergate is a complex of offices, apartments, and a hotel that sits along the Potomac River in Washington, DC. In 1972, it was also home to the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee. On June 17 of that year, the DNC offices were ransacked. At first it just looked like a break-in. But after arrests were made, one of the five burglars, James McCord, said in court that he had retired from the CIA.
That surprised a reporter from The Washington Post. Bob Woodward and his colleague Carl Bernstein began to dig. Eventually, they learned McCord wasn’t just a former CIA man — he was the salaried security coordinator for President Nixon’s reelection committee, and was also under contract to provide security services to the Republican National Committee. The Post ran the story the next day under the headline “GOP Security Aide Among Five Arrested in Bugging Affair.”
What Woodward and Bernstein eventually uncovered was a sprawling spying and cover-up operation directed by Nixon’s reelection campaign. Almost immediately, the political press started using “Watergate” as shorthand for the entire scheme. From then on, it was no longer just the name of the hotel, it was the name of the very scandal itself.
But here’s the twist: Watergate alone didn’t give us “-gate.”
The magazine that did it first
The first time anyone took the suffix off the Watergate building and stuck it onto a different scandal, it wasn’t a newspaper. It was a comedy magazine. National Lampoon — the monthly humor magazine that began publishing in the 1970s and would later spawn a generation of Saturday Night Live writers — ran a joke in a fake news roundup tied to a visit to the US by Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. The anecdote, appearing in the August 1973 issue, imagined a scandal rocking the Kremlin, one the magazine called the “Volgagate” — the Volga being Russia’s most famous river. The joke was that liberal officials in the USSR had been caught removing bugs from telephones, mixing actual letters and telegrams from Soviet citizens in with the usual phony ones, and telling the truth to foreign newsmen, among other things.
The universal scandal name
The person who relentlessly used “-gate” as the all-purpose scandal suffix was William Safire — Nixon’s former speechwriter, who reinvented himself as a New York Times columnist after his old boss resigned. Safire spent the next three decades attaching “-gate” to scandals involving his political opponents: Billygate in 1980 (about President Jimmy Carter’s brother, Billy, who engaged in unregistered lobbying and financial dealings with the Libyan government), Travelgate in 1993 (about the firing of seven employees in the travel office of the Clinton White House — allegedly to allow friends and campaign donors to take over), Whitewatergate of 1994 (about the Clintons’ Arkansas real estate investments), and on and on.
So why did Safire keep reaching for “-gate”? Writing in New York Magazine, columnist Noam Cohen offered a theory: that by relentlessly attaching it to the scandals of Nixon’s successors, Safire was diminishing his guilt by association. Safire came close to confirming this himself. He told author Eric Alterman that he had used “-gate” so freely partly to minimize the impact of the crimes his old boss committed.
Others picked up the habit, though a tad slowly. But here’s the part that surprises people: the suffix did not spread right away. For roughly two decades, “-gate” stayed mostly Safire’s lingo. Other writers used it now and then, but sparingly. The press tried Nannygate in 1993, when two of Bill Clinton’s attorney-general nominees were found to have hired undocumented immigrants as household help. But these examples were scattered. As an analysis by The Conversation points out, the great majority of “-gate” scandals are far more recent — the suffix’s first three decades produced only a small share.
In September 2013, aides to New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie ordered lane closures on the George Washington Bridge — allegedly as political payback against a local mayor who had refused to endorse Christie’s reelection. Thousands of commuters spent days stuck in traffic. One aide’s now-infamous email read: “Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee.” It was that specific email, paired with the absurdity of a sitting governor allegedly weaponizing a bridge against a small-town mayor, that locked in the name. The press settled on the name “Bridgegate” within days.
While many “-gates” involve corruption, sex scandals, and national security risks, the suffix has been applied in lots of less serious incidents involving politicians too. One notable time was in 2019, when MSNBC’s Chris Matthews was interviewing then–Rep. Eric Swalwell and there was an audible noise mid-interview. You know where this is going, right? Yes, that was dubbed “Fartgate.” (Swalwell denied passing the gas.)
Beyond politics
Not all “-gates” are political. Sometimes they’re about football. In January 2015, the NFL accused the New England Patriots of using slightly underinflated footballs during the AFC Championship game against the Indianapolis Colts. Underinflated balls are easier to grip, especially in cold weather. Quarterback Tom Brady got suspended for four games. The Patriots denied intentionally cheating. The story broke on a Sunday, and within days, sports columnists, talk-radio hosts, and Twitter (now X) had collectively settled on the same name: “Deflategate.” The suffix did all the work — readers understood immediately that this was an NFL cheating scandal, even if they didn’t know the specifics.
And that wasn’t the first football-related “-gate”: During the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show, a wardrobe malfunction briefly exposed Janet Jackson’s breast on live TV and was instantly called “Nipplegate.”
Though the term originated in the US, the folks across the Atlantic have taken a fancy too.
During the Covid-19 lockdowns, while ordinary Britons were banned from social gatherings, including most hospital visits, reports surfaced that Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s staff at 10 Downing Street had been holding parties. Lots of parties, including the prime minister’s 56th birthday bash. The name “Partygate” was a British coinage — British tabloids and newspapers used it first.
The Metropolitan Police issued 126 fines to 83 people over gatherings on eight separate dates. Johnson received one fine personally, making him the first sitting UK prime minister to be penalized for breaking the law while in office.
The suffix shows no sign of slowing down. Watergate established its meaning. Signalgate, Deflategate, Partygate, and the hundreds of small-stakes -gates in between have made it something closer to a reflex.
And to think — somewhere in a humor magazine office in 1973, a writer banged out a Volga River joke and went home for the day. Five decades and several countries later, the joke is still going.