What Is a Quid Pro Quo (and Is It Always Bad)?

The answer is pretty straightforward. A quid pro quo is an exchange of goods or services for, well, other goods or services. (Literally, the Latin phrase means “this for that.”) If you’re wondering why this seemingly benign description of a transaction has such a negative connotation, read on.

First off, consider this: You’ve probably engaged in a quid pro quo this month. Have you ever asked friends to help you move and promised them beer and pizza in exchange? That’s a quid pro quo. What about inviting a child to your daughter’s birthday party because she was invited to theirs? Or even clicking on a link to get an answer to a question? Yep, quid pro quos. You may say that those are examples of reciprocity, or friendship, or doing favors. They are. The negative aspect often comes in when there is an expectation of the quo for the quid.

The origin of the phrase dates to the 16th century, when it was used to describe a transaction in which an apothecary would substitute one ingredient in a concoction for another. The list of acceptable substitutes was called a quid pro quo. (Who knew generics dated back that far?) But sometimes the substitutes didn’t work as well as the original, and that may be the first introduction of the negative connotation. It was also adopted by the legal profession to describe contractual agreements, but in that context the phrase had a decidedly more neutral tone.

Discover how ordinary objects work, and expand your understanding of the familiar.

SIGN UP

" height="20" alt="HEW Logo">

Thank you for signing up!"

Back to homepage

By clicking "Sign Up", you consent to the Britannica Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.

Regardless of the origin—and regardless of whether they’re deemed transactions, favors, or power plays—quid pro quos have an enduring role in history, business, and popular culture. Here’s a look at some quid pro quos over time. You can decide how to parse them for yourself.

Compromise of 1790

Note that history does not record this agreement, engineered by no less than Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison, as the Quid Pro Quo of 1790. It took 225 years and Lin-Manuel Miranda to call it that. But consider the situation in the summer of 1790. Hamilton, as secretary of the treasury, was lobbying hard for the federal government to assume the Revolutionary War debts incurred by the states as a way to consolidate the power of the purse strings within the federal government. Northern states largely supported the move, but Southern states and their leaders, including Madison and Jefferson, opposed the action in large part because the South had already paid off much of its debt and therefore would benefit little from the plan. Congress had been deadlocked on the issue for months.

At the same time the thorny discussion of where the country’s capital should be was similarly stalled in Congress. There had been votes on Baltimore, Maryland, and Wilmington, Delaware; both failed. So in June 1790 Jefferson invited Madison and Hamilton for dinner in New York City, where Congress was meeting. Although there is no transcript of what was discussed, the idea of Madison supporting the debt plan, with Jefferson as mediator, in exchange for New York–loving Hamilton allowing the capital to be placed farther south, on the banks of the Potomac River (more convenient for Jefferson and Madison and in keeping with Southern interests), certainly came up. What is undisputed is that after months of gridlock, a bill designating the city that would become Washington, D.C., as the capital passed in July, followed in August by Hamilton’s funding plan. This bit of history is immortalized in Miranda’s blockbuster musical Hamilton in the song “The Room Where It Happens.”

Jefferson was no stranger to quid pro quos. After defeating Aaron Burr in the presidential election of 1800, Jefferson thanked three congressmen whose votes helped him claim victory by giving them positions in his government. That might sound like business as usual, but in 1801 the Federalist-leaning newspaper the Hartford Courant used the term quid pro quo in a headline about the political maneuver.

Explore Britannica Premium!

The trusted destination for professionals, college students, and lifelong learners.

SUBSCRIBE

Rutherford B. Hayes and Reconstruction

There was no real election day in 1876; instead, there were four months of national crisis and uncertainty. The result was yet another “compromise,” this one in 1877, that would cast a shadow on the country’s race relations for the better part of the next century.

To recap: On election night 1876 Democrat Samuel Tilden was this close to winning the presidency. He had 184 of the 185 electoral votes required for victory. Republican Rutherford B. Hayes had 165 votes. Twenty electoral votes (including a debated one originally given to Tilden) were up for grabs. If Hayes could somehow win those outstanding votes, the presidency would be his.

Over the course of almost four months, the presidency hung in the balance. The votes of three Southern states (Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina), as well as one contested elector in Oregon, were claimed by both candidates. When, by January 1877, there was still no victor, Congress—fearing another civil war—appointed an unprecedented Electoral Commission to rule on the contested slates of electors. The commission controversially wound up being made up of eight Republicans and seven Democrats. While it was deliberating, Republican allies of Hayes engaged with moderate Southern Democrats in secret negotiations aimed at securing Hayes’s election. Finally, on March 2, 1877, the commission voted, awarding the outstanding electoral votes to Hayes.

Here’s where the quid pro quo comes in. Just months after his inauguration, Hayes, keeping secret pledges to those Southern Democrats to help swing the election his way, withdrew federal troops from Southern states that had been occupied since the end of the Civil War to ensure fair treatment of formerly enslaved people. Reconstruction was over; Jim Crow was around the bend.

Me Too movement

One of the most insidious forms of quid pro quo involves the expectation of an exchange of sexual favors for advancement—or to avoid negative repercussions—in the workplace. Such action was expressly banned under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Yet the Me Too movement made clear in the 2010s that the law had done little to halt the practice, at least in some corners of America’s workplaces. The revelations in 2017 that Hollywood mega-producer Harvey Weinstein had used his power in the movie industry over the course of decades to engage in sexually predatory behavior led to the identification of many other men who—explicitly or implicitly—had used their power to make women feel that they had to submit to sexual advances. It was the ultimate quid pro quo, and investigative reporting and women coming forward as part of the Me Too movement brought shame, criminal convictions, and the end of careers for some very well-known and previously respected figures, including:

• Comedian Bill Cosby
• Today show host Matt Lauer
• PBS host Charlie Rose
• Singer R. Kelly
• Gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar
• Financier Jeffrey Epstein

In popular culture

As with many phrases or concepts that become prominent in law and politics, quid pro quo has found its way into popular culture. Here are just a few examples:

• The Godfather: The riveting opening scene of the movie features Mafia boss Don Corleone, played by Marlon Brando, being visited by an undertaker and family friend who seeks justice for his daughter who has been brutally attacked. The undertaker wants the attackers murdered, but Corleone disputes that would not be justice: “Your daughter is still alive,” he says. Ultimately, Corleone agrees to mete out a form of justice but not before making the quid pro quo clear: “Some day, and that day may never come, I’ll call upon you to do a service for me.” That day does come, when Sonny Corleone is murdered and the undertaker handles the funeral arrangements.
• The Silence of the Lambs: If Brando’s use of quid pro quo was understated, the same cannot be said for Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter. In the game of psychological chess Lecter is playing with Jodie Foster’s Clarice Starling character, he is disconcertingly direct: “Quid pro quo. I tell you things; you tell me things. Not about this case, though, about yourself. Quid pro quo. Yes or no?”
• The Little Mermaid: In the Disney film, sea witch Ursula offers to give mermaid Ariel human legs if Ariel will gift Ursula her singing voice. It is, as Ursula calls it, a “squid pro quo.”

The Trump presidencies

The presidencies of Donald Trump have probably done more to put the phrase top of mind than anything else in recent memory. In 2019 Merriam-Webster considered the quid pro quo for its Word of the Year, spurred in part by a 644 percent surge in lookups of the phrase. (Merriam-Webster chose they instead.) The reason for the surge in searches was the number of times Trump—and his allies—repeated “no quid pro quo” in reference to a 2019 phone conversation between newly elected Ukrainian Pres. Volodymyr Zelensky and Trump. That call, which Trump has described as a “perfect” call, came to be seen as an attempt by Trump to coerce Zelensky into announcing an investigation of Trump’s political rival Joe Biden and Biden’s son Hunter for alleged wrongdoing in connection with a Ukrainian energy company. On the call Trump said to Zelensky, “I would like you to do us a favor though….” Within hours of the conversation, records indicate that Trump ordered a pause on military aid to Ukraine. The actions by the president against a potential political rival in the 2020 presidential election were seen by Democrats as election interference. In December 2019 Trump was impeached for his role in the Ukraine scandal by the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives; in February 2020 he was acquitted by the Republican-controlled Senate.

(Read the transcript of the Trump-Zelensky call.)

Trump’s actions during his second term certainly seemed to indicate that he saw his mandate as making deals—getting this for that, as it were—to benefit the country and, sometimes, to benefit him personally. Examples of what have been called quid pro quos during Trump’s second term include:

• The Eric Adams case: Adams, the Democratic mayor of New York City, was indicted in September 2024 on charges of accepting illegal gifts from Turkish officials in what, it could be argued, was its own quid pro quo. (You can read more about the specifics here.) But, with Trump’s 2024 election, the case against Adams began to teeter. During the transition period, Adams visited Trump at Mar-a-Lago and accepted a last-minute invitation to Trump’s inauguration amid speculation that Adams was seeking a pardon from Trump. Instead, Trump’s Justice Department moved to drop the charges, prompting Judge Dale Ho to offer this rebuke: “Everything here smacks of a bargain: dismissal of the Indictment in exchange for immigration policy concessions.”
• The new Air Force One: In May 2025 Trump announced that he would be accepting a $200 million jet from the government of Qatar as a replacement for the aging presidential jet. In a social media post, Trump made the argument that he was saving U.S. taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars: “Why should our military, and therefore our taxpayers, be forced to pay hundreds of millions of Dollars when they can get it for FREE.” But the gift immediately sparked questions about whether it was legal, given that the emoluments clause of the Constitution bans federal officeholders from accepting gifts from foreign countries. The plain purpose of the emoluments clause was to ensure that the country’s leaders would not be improperly influenced, even unconsciously, through gift giving. For its part, the government of Qatar denied that it was trying to curry favor. Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani called the offer “a normal thing that happens between allies.”
• The cryptocurrency dinner: In May 2025 Trump hosted a dinner at his Virginia golf club for 220 people who bought the most meme coins associated with his $TRUMP cryptocurrency. Unlike money from campaign fundraisers, which goes to promote a candidate, the money raised through the sale of the cryptocurrency went directly to the Trump family. Many of those in attendance were business leaders whose companies are headquartered overseas; some said they saw the dinner as an opportunity to influence U.S. policy on crypto. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt brushed aside questions about the guest list and whether the Trump family could be profiting from a presidential event, saying that he was hosting the dinner on “personal time” and noting that “this president was incredibly successful before giving it all up to serve our country publicly.”

The ultimate anti–quid pro quo

One of the most discussed quid pro quos in American history almost certainly was nothing of the sort. When Richard Nixon resigned the presidency in August 1974 in the wake of the Watergate scandal, Gerald Ford became the only person ever to become president without having been elected either vice president or president. Nixon had chosen Ford, a well-respected, long-serving member of Congress, to replace Spiro Agnew, who had resigned in disgrace. Ford became vice president in December 1973. Less than a year later Ford became president, and in one of his first acts as president, on September 8, 1974, he issued a full pardon to Nixon.

It was a spectacularly controversial and unpopular decision. Almost immediately speculation arose that Nixon had offered Ford the vice presidency in exchange for the promise of a pardon if Nixon resigned or were to be impeached and convicted. Public opinion polling at the time indicated that a majority of Americans opposed the pardon. Controversy was so strong that Ford, in a highly unusual move for a president, made an appearance before members of the House Judiciary Committee in October 1974 to explain his decision:

I was absolutely convinced then as I am now that, if we had…an indictment, a trial, a conviction, and anything else that transpired after that, that the attention of the president, the Congress, and the American people would have been diverted from the problems that we have to solve. And that was the principal reason for my granting of the pardon.

When Ford lost the 1976 presidential election to Jimmy Carter, there were plenty of reasons to cite—including campaign missteps and persistent inflation—but the lingering impacts of Watergate and the pardon certainly played a role. There is a case to be made that, in making the decision to pardon Nixon, Ford received no quid for the pardon quo. Ultimately, even some of the people most invested in the uncovering of the Watergate scandal could find no evidence of Ford acting out of self-interest in issuing the pardon. Watergate prosecutor Richard Ben-Veniste wrote shortly after Ford’s death that “there was no secret quid pro quo with Nixon for a pardon in return for resignation.” And Ben Bradlee, the executive editor of The Washington Post during Watergate, said that what motivated Ford to pardon Nixon was that he was “a compulsively decent man.”