Has Donald Trump Made It Easier for Future Politicians to Deal with Scandal?

People with colourful lives have, in recent years, struggled to get very far in politics. Dodgy business deals, affairs, coke-fuelled weekends in motorway Holiday Inns: indiscretions from your past were something political rivals could attack you with. All this basically made politics a no-go zone for people like you. Instead, candidates for office had to be "clean", no criminal behaviour, married with kids: career-politicians with no life experience.

Obviously that has changed over the past few years. The rise of populism has seen new types of leaders taking control: divorcees, socialists, atheists, people with a history of dodgy political and business ties. Boris Johnson, Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders all broke the mould in one way or another, but no one in the history of politics has more skeletons in their closet than Donald Trump. His controversies have their own Wikipedia index page.

But could Trump actually be setting a good precedent in this regard? By becoming immune to scandal, could he be creating a political climate in which normal people with normal pasts are able to get into power in a more honest way?

According to experts, that all depends on the nature of the demons. "Obviously, if you're quite left wing and you're standing on a workers' rights platform and you own stocks in companies which are notoriously bad for employment, that's going to undermine your message," says Dean Burnett, doctor of neuroscience and professor at Cardiff University. "But if you're an environmental person who turns out to have had an affair, then that's not good, but it's not exactly linked. You can ride that out."

WATCH: Desus and Mero chat Trump.

Rather than becoming more forgiving, Burnett thinks the electorate is becoming immune to scandals. He says Trump is the perfect example of this. Having so many skeletons was to his advantage because it normalised him. "When the media reports on something every day for six months it doesn't have any impact because we are all used to it," he says. "This is a process called habituation, whereby our brains and nervous system stop reacting to things that become too familiar and too common. We just become acclimatised to them, like we do with drugs. You build up a tolerance. For Trump, things from the past became the norm and they kind of cancelled themselves out."

Andrew Blick, lecturer in Politics and Contemporary History at King's College London, agrees. "Trump hasn't got a skeleton in the closet – he's got a whole mortuary in there. But this doesn't seem to matter," he says. "The more you throw at him, the more people like him. If someone's platform is about rejecting people's values and the establishment, then sometimes nothing can be thrown against them that sticks because people don't care in the first place."

This change of attitude couldn't have come at a better time. In an age where everyone has their entire lives posted on social media – videos of them smashed, taking drugs, doing weird stuff at parties – things that were rumoured about Cameron's generation (such as pig-gate) will now be plainly evidenced in photos and videos. Those stories still carry a lot of weight. Already, politicians like Chuka Umunna – who withdrew from the leadership race because of the added media attention – have been cowed by the press.

"I can definitely see people going, 'Oh, what the hell – if Trump can be elected on the wave of all all those scandals then there's nothing stopping me,'" says Burnett. "He has set the bar so high for career ending scandals that it's kind of hard to top that. They can come back and say, 'Oh, you had an affair in 2008,' but you can come back and say, 'Well, Donald Trump was caught on camera being a sex pest, so why vote for him and not me?' It does give counterpoints to almost any argument now." Bale agrees that for all Trump's doing to strike fear into the hearts of millennials, he's probably made it easier for them to get into politics. "Aspirant politicians with shady pasts probably stand more of a chance of making it. As long, that is, as they are thick-skinned enough not to worry too much about people finding out about whatever it is they've done."

@tessreidy

More on VICE:

Every Insult the Right Uses to Troll Liberals, Explained

Why Empathy Is Dangerous

What the Left Can Learn from the Alt Right