Scandal’s President Fitz: A liberal in Republican clothing

Shonda Rhimes’ Scandal aired every Thursday from 2012 until its last season in 2018, putting a monopoly on Thursday evenings. It centres around Olivia Pope (Kerry Washington), the former Communications Director of the White House, who runs a crisis management firm in DC to handle the scandals of politicians and people in the public eye. Rhimes drew inspiration for Pope from President Bush’s press aide, Judy Smith, who worked as an executive producer on the show. Smith was known from her time at the White House as a straightforward, calm presence among the relentless askings of the Bush administration. It is with these qualities that she founded Smith & Company, a crisis management team that assisted figures like Monica Lewinsky and Michael Vick through public scandals.

Whilst Scandal is focused on Olivia and her crisis management team – Olivia Pope and Associates – the White House and surrounding political scene play a significant role, particularly Olivia’s relationship with President Fitzgerald Grant III (Tony Goldwyn), the show’s leading male and Pope’s main love interest. Other political satire shows, like Veep, cleverly depict a failing White House without a single mention of which party the characters belong to or what the administration represents. Rhimes, on the other hand, played into the political theme and made it clear that Fitz is a Republican President, with Olivia Pope’s loyalty to Fitz suggesting she too was a conservative character. 

The show ran alongside the rapid and unprecedented change in the American political environment of the 2010s. When Scandal first aired, Obama was President and by the second season was running for his second term. By the third season, Hollis Doyle, played by Gregg Henry, was created – a bumbling presidential candidate who physically resembles Donald Trump, and considering much of his time is spent ordering his assistant to bring him burgers, Doyle resembles him in other ways too. 

These political labels seemed incongruous with the morals the characters exhibited

Through characters like Hollis Doyle, the show subtly acknowledges the environment it was operating in. Therefore, the decision to label Fitz as a Republican President is a confusing one. A figure who openly supported a woman’s right to an abortion, who had a tight focus on gun control, and had an administration that was far more inclusive than Trump’s first or second term, seemed to align more with the values of a liberal Democratic President than a Republican one. 

These political labels seemed incongruous with the morals the characters exhibited across the show’s seven seasons. Goldwyn said he studied two Presidents in particular, when tackling his role: Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, both Democrats. He said that their “accessibility, down-to-earth quality and higher mission to connect with people” were all qualities that he felt they shared with Republican Fitz.  

The show in no way presented Fitz as a perfect President; it begins with a dispute between the President and a woman claiming to have had an affair with him – perhaps Goldwyn’s study of the Clinton presidency was taken too literally. The show is rife with election rigging and murders, and at one point Fitz goes to war solely to keep Olivia out of harm’s way. But, among these ‘scandals’, there were many moments where Fitz’s Republican administration passed laws and legislation that directly mirrored bills passed by real Democrats in the real White House. 

Fictional President Fitz and real President Obama seemed to be on a very similar page

Arguably, the most prevalent were gun control laws and regulations. Fitz’s second State of the Union address focuses entirely on increasing gun safety laws. He begins by stating that, while the right to bear arms was set in the Constitution, so was slavery. In a similar fashion, Obama spoke in the same year about the work that needed to be done to ensure that ‘first graders’ aren’t “taken from their parents’ lives by the bullet of a gun.” He compared the ‘work’ to that of the work done to abolish slavery.  

At one point, as Fitz defends his plans to tighten gun legislation, an unusual move by a Republican President, he states: “I need some jerk to not be able to buy an AK-47 and shoot up a school.” Meanwhile, after a school shooting in Roseburg, Oregon that same year, President Obama said that: “thoughts and prayers … do nothing to nothing to prevent this carnage from being inflicted someplace else in America – next week, or a couple months from now.” A law was then passed in Oregon allowing parents to prohibit their children from possessing deadly weapons if the individual is determined to present an imminent threat to themselves or others. Fictional President Fitz and real President Obama seemed to be on a very similar page. 

In the first season of the show, Fitz and his cabinet attempt to pass the DREAM Act, a bill that gave “children of illegal immigrants an easier pathway to college”, according to Fitz’s fictional gay Chief of Staff, another now inconceivable feature of a Republican administration. Whilst other Republican advisors on the show mention it as a “divisive issue, even within the Republican party”, Fitz persuades Senators to vote for the Act, and convinces his ultra-conservative Vice President, perhaps the only consistently Republican figure in the show, to vote in favour of the bill. Fitz claims he “tore her right-wing guts out” – a phrase present-day Democrats perhaps wish they could use more often.  

Both the DREAM Act and Fitz’s foundation… seem inherently liberal

This show was record-breaking in many ways – Olivia Pope, played by Kerry Washington, was the first black female lead character on a US primetime network show since the early 1970s. This display of diversity was mirrored in plots across the show. In the last season, after Fitz serves his two terms and the country is under the control of a second President Grant, Fitz’s ex-wife Mellie, he sets up a foundation focused on helping minority groups across America. Fitz’s foundation even attempts to help Olivia and her team with a class action suit about mass incarceration, after she brings the case to Fitz, stating he gave disadvantaged people “hope, that their American nightmare can become an American dream.”  

Both the DREAM Act and Fitz’s foundation, together set on helping people of colour live equal and full lives in modern-day America, seem inherently liberal. In 2024, Democratic President Biden announced an executive order to keep immigrant families together, affecting Dreamers, spouses of citizens, and children. Democratic President Obama was the first President in over 20 years to leave office with a smaller federal prison population than when he started. 

Meanwhile, Republican President Trump continues to implement executive orders targeting Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programmes, and recently attempted to fire Lisa Cook, the first Black woman to serve on the Federal Reserve, an autonomous and independent body. LaTosha Brown, co-founder of the organisation Black Voters Matter, claimed that it was driven by racism: “Lisa Cook isn’t even chair of the board, so why would you pick her? He chose to fire her out of all the governors because she’s a Black woman.” Unlike in Scandal, Trump’s cabinet in 2016 was the least racially diverse cabinet since 1980. Furthermore, his clampdown on illegal immigration in the US, using Immigration Customs Enforcement and the National Guard, has seen more migrants dead in detention centres over the past 10 months than across the four years of the Biden administration. 

It is clear that on a moral level, Fitzgerald Grant seems to run a liberal White House

Whilst Scandal exaggerated and fabricated life in the White House and the role of the Presidency – a secret spy organisation and a President who employs full-time murderers is not a truthful depiction of the White House (at least not yet anyway) – it is clear that on a moral level, Fitzgerald Grant seems to run a liberal White House. His support for abortion rights through the funding of Planned Parenthood, his diverse cabinet, and his push for bills that encourage diversity and rights for all, do not coincide with those of the current Republican administration.  

Perhaps his Vice President, a character who attempts to unconstitutionally gain control of the Presidency, who refers to all immigrants as “illegal”, who labels abortionists as “babykillers”, calls gay people “godless creatures”, and eventually goes on to host a right-wing evangelical talk show, may be a more fitting representation of the Republican Party today. 

There are many practical reasons why Rhimes decided to make Fitz a Republican – after all the show was based on a woman who served under a Republican President herself. Rhimes said she wanted to “take a Republican President and make him human”, making it rather ironic that in her attempt to humanise a Republican, she ultimately created a closeted Democrat.