It’s an election year, and candidates are constantly misleading voters about their opponents in advertisements many of us wish we’d never seen. What are candidates allowed to say? How much are they allowed to lie? And is artificial intelligence making it easier than ever to distort reality?

This week on Scandalized, we tackle the campaign finance system that got us here, and the increasingly embarrassing lengths politicians will go to separate you from your money.

The Scandalized time machine is back up and running. This week, we’re headed back to 1876 to correct the record on the wildest presidential election outcome in American history. The contest between Rutherford B. Hayes and Samuel Tilden was undoubtedly close; but was it actually corrupt?

In the late 2010s, things went south – deep south – very quickly in Mississippi with a scandal fit for a football legend. This week on Scandalized, a network of political figures gets caught up misusing funds; but former NFL quarterback Brett Favre offers up the star power to turn it into a national scandal.

To kick off season 2, Charlie and Jaci give listeners a brief break from the man at the top, and dive deep on Trump’s top lieutenants, including in his cabinet. This week on Scandalized: Scott Pruitt, Kash Patel, and what happens when the Executive Branch looks too much like the Executive Suite.

As a topper for our mini-season, we’re bringing you a live show we did earlier in 2025 from Treefort Music Fest in Boise! Charlie reminds Jaci about Howard Dean’s “scream heard ‘round the world,” and Jaci schools Charlie on a big city mayor who might have been better off not writing a children’s book.

In season one, we purposely avoided doing an episode about Donald Trump; but the first year of Trump’s second term is too scandalous to ignore. In this episode, we break down the new, the old, and the truly unprecedented of Trump’s second-term scandals. We cover Trump’s pardons for government insurrectionists and his questionable allies; his unprecedented financial entanglements with the office he holds; and, of course, the Epstein of it all.

Charlie and Jaci revisit a couple of their favorite stories from season one, including fan favorites like Gov. Rod Blagojevich. We also talk exclusively with Gov. Sanford’s former chief of staff for an insider’s account of the “Appalachian Trail” scandal, and check in with new efforts to ban insider trading in Congress.

The culinary journey continues with some more food fails in very public political spaces. A president gets sick in the lap of another head of state; Marco Rubio learns about the fine art of drinking from a water bottle; and two U.S. Senators school us on the finer points of hot dogs and tuna melts.