On May 17, 1973, televised hearings regarding the Watergate scandal began in the United States Senate, Sen. Sam Ervin presiding.
Little did participants know that the name of the hotel in which the White House-arranged break-ins occurred would provide a template for most future political scandals: “-gate” would be suffixed to nearly every other possible designator of scandal. The Democratic vendetta against Republican Donald Trump for winning the 2016 election has been called “Russiagate,” for example.
And on May 11, 2020, Trump retweeted a previous post with one additional word: “OBAMAGATE!”
This could be called a “suffix meme.” Or “insufferable meme,” if you prefer.
1 reply on “The Original ‑gate!”
After the Watergate scandal, the next “-gate” in America about which I heard was Koreagate. In that case, the criminal activity began years before the burglary at the Watergate Hotel, but didn’t become public knowledge until years later. But Koreagate swiftly disappeared from discussion by the major journalistic operations, because it reflected badly on the favored party.
In some other countries, appending “-gate” to name a scandal was for a time still more popular than in America.