A Year At The Circus

by Jon Sopel

  I could honestly take up the rest of the chapter with Pruitt excesses – the $42,000 of unauthorised expenditure to install a soundproof telephone booth in his office; the EPA staff who were tasked with persuading a fast food chain, Chick-fil-A, to allow his wife to become a franchise owner. His demand that he be given a 24/7 security detail, even though his post was not normally deemed high risk – he even insisted they use their sirens and flashing lights when moving around, irrespective of whether he was on government business or not. He was also alleged by House of Representatives Democrats to have run a number of different email accounts and calendars so that he could schedule meetings in secret, without their existence ever appearing on official records. Likewise, he was reported to have used a number of different phones so there were no call records of who he’d spoken to. Now if memory serves me correctly, Republicans made quite a big fuss about Hillary Clinton using a private email server when she was Secretary of State. Pots and kettles? Stones and glass houses?

  What was astonishing about Scott Pruitt was not that he resigned/was fired, but that he was able to last as long as he did – particularly given the President’s swamp draining promise. Week after week new stories would emerge about questionable behaviour, bringing unwelcome attention. And week after week the President chose to turn a blind eye. But Trump was torn – he knew that these daily headlines were damaging, but he didn’t want to give a ‘scalp’ to the media, and he thought Pruitt was one of the administration’s most effective operators. Another theory that I heard advanced about what finally tipped Trump over the edge in deciding to get rid of him was annoyance at just how much attention he was getting; just how much ink was being spilled on Scott Pruitt. The limelight could only belong to one person.

  Over the years I have reported on any number of political resignations. There have been the letters that were slightly pitiful when a politician has fallen short, and has been caught in a humiliating scandal. There are the letters spitting anger and rage, that are all but wrapped round a brick and hurled through the window of the president or prime minister with a molotov cocktail attached. Scott Pruitt’s will earn its place in the annals – for its total lack of contrition, and the grovelling ‘I love you so much, Donald’ tone. It really is something:

  Mr President, it has been an honor to serve you in the Cabinet as Administrator of the EPA. Truly, your confidence in me has blessed me personally and enabled me to advance your agenda beyond what anyone anticipated at the beginning of your Administration. Your courage, steadfastness and resolute commitment to get results for the American people, both with regard to improved environmental outcomes as well as historical regulatory reform, is in fact occurring at an unprecedented pace and I thank you for the opportunity to serve you and the American people in helping achieve those ends.

  That is why it is hard for me to advise you I am stepping down as Administrator of the EPA effective as of July 6. It is extremely difficult for me to cease serving you in this role first because I count it a blessing to be serving you in any capacity, but also, because of the transformative work that is occurring. However, the unrelenting attacks on me personally, my family, are unprecedented and have taken a sizable toll on all of us.

  My desire in service to you has always been to bless you as you make important decisions for the American people. I believe you are serving as President today because of God’s providence. I believe that same providence brought me into your service. I pray as I have served you that I have blessed you and enabled you to effectively lead the American people. Thank you again Mr President for the honour of serving you and I wish you Godspeed in all that you put your hand to.

  Your Faithful Friend,

  Scott Pruitt

  Pruitt wasn’t the only one to find that his moral compass was struggling to locate magnetic north. The health and human services secretary, Tom Price, was forced out after it emerged that he’d spent – well, strictly speaking, the taxpayer had spent – a fortune on travel for him to swan around on private jets. An investigation by the Office of the Inspector General found that he improperly used federal funds for his travel to the tune of three hundred and forty one thousand dollars. Price’s coat was already hanging by a wobbly peg, after repeated efforts to repeal and replace the signature Obama era policy – the Affordable Care Act – had foundered and flopped. That didn’t impress the President, but it wasn’t fatal. His penchant for Gulfstreams, though, proved to be. Just before his departure, he apologised for taking the flights and offered to reimburse the Treasury for the relevant costs. The former Georgia congressman wrote a letter of apology in which he noted, ‘All of my political career I’ve fought for taxpayers. It is clear to me that in this case, I was not sensitive enough to my concern for the taxpayer.’ I wonder which bit of hiring private jets he thought would be sensitive enough for taxpayers. Anyway, it was too late, and after 231 days in the role he was gone. The President said he didn’t like the ‘optics’.

  Then there was the Veterans Affairs Secretary, David Shulkin. He was the only Trump nominee to be unanimously confirmed. He was that rarest of birds: someone who had served in the Obama White House yet was enough in favour to be offered a berth in the Trump cabinet. Rumours of a toxic atmosphere within his department started to circulate, and there were policy disagreements with Trump nominees over the extent to which he was privatising the VA, the sprawling and vast federal department that provides healthcare to those who serve and have served in the military. Trump surrogates felt he should be going much further.

  But it wasn’t policy that did for him, it was money. And a nice trip to Europe for him and his wife. The report of the department’s internal inspector was damning. He had ordered a subordinate to handle personal travel plans for him and his wife during an official trip to Europe. While there, he was found to have improperly accepted tickets for Wimbledon as a gift during the trip. Among other ‘serious derelictions’, the report also accused Shulkin’s chief of staff of potential criminal conduct by making false statements and altering a document so that the Veterans Affairs Department could ‘improperly’ pay for Shulkin’s wife to travel to Europe with him, at a cost to taxpayers of $4,312. Shulkin always maintained that there was ‘nothing inappropriate’ about what he did, and that he had paid for the Wimbledon tickets himself.

  But the eventual report (which Mr Shulkin described as inaccurate and biased) was less supportive of Mr Shulkin. It found that one of his staff had ‘effectively acted as a personal travel concierge’ to Shulkin and his wife for the trip to Copenhagen and London. Meanwhile Shulkin and the VA made misstatements to the media about aspects of the trip, the report says, with Shulkin inaccurately claiming to a reporter that he had bought the tickets for the tennis tournament himself. The VA Secretary would discover his services were no longer required when the President tweeted that he had been fired. He wouldn’t be the last to suffer that fate.

  Others in his cabinet have got themselves into similar scrapes. Ben Carson, who ran against Trump for the Republican nomination, and was appointed housing and urban development secretary, got into trouble after it appeared he was rather too interested in his own housing, and in particular the development of his office. A $31,000 mahogany dining room table and chairs was ordered as part of a refurbishment of his office suite. When this became public, Carson said he was not aware of how expensive the dining room set was and requested that the order be cancelled. He insisted it was nothing to do with him, and that the order for the furniture had been placed by subordinates. Emails unearthed using freedom of information legislation proved otherwise.

  Mr Carson’s wife, Candy, played a central role in coordinating the redecoration of the office – even down to scheduling an appointment with interior decorators, reviewing photo boards of furniture choices and pressuring staff members to find more money for furnishings, according to the emails. This was all going on as the Trump administration proposed extensive cuts to his department’s budget. The trove of emails also revealed tha
t senior HUD officials were scrambling to work out ways to reconcile Mrs Carson’s demands for the major upgrade to the office suite with federal laws that prohibit expenditure of more than $5,000 on office furniture without congressional approval. Carson, who in his previous life had been a brain surgeon, had given the White House a mighty headache, but he was not required to walk the plank over this.

  Nor was Ryan Zinke, the Interior Secretary. Zinke, who hailed from Montana and had once been a Navy SEAL, arrived for work on his first day on horseback, complete with cowboy hat. But when he wasn’t riding horses, he too had a bit of a thing about getting around on private planes. Thousands of dollars were spent on charter flights. He used his political clout to censor politically unhelpful work. So a report on climate change by the independent body which runs America’s wonderful national parks, the National Park Service, was censored because it reached conclusions at variance with the views of the administration. He is alleged to have blocked a casino project on a Native American reservation that was ready to be given the go-ahead, after visits from a potential competitor’s lobbyists who ran their own casino 12 or so miles away. And a property deal was also under investigation that he stood to benefit from. Zinke’s answer to these multiple investigations being carried out by his department’s Inspector General was novel. The Washington Post reported that he sought to fire the incumbent, and replace him with someone more emollient, who had been a political appointee by the Trump administration, rather than a career public servant. And to the specific charges, Zinke said he wasn’t going to spend thousands of dollars ‘defending himself and his family against false allegations.’

  Zinke was gone by the end of 2018, as a slew of ethics investigations gathered pace and his presence in the administration became a growing embarrassment. In early 2019, with all those ethics questions over his head, it was announced that he was teaming up with Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s former campaign manager and still a regular visitor to the White House, in a Washington lobbying firm – exactly the sort of revolving door practice that the President had promised to end.

  Even one of the most senior members of the Trump cabinet would find himself in hot water. The Treasury Secretary, Steve Mnuchin – yes, you’ve guessed it – would get into trouble for the whole private jet thing. Although his case has a couple of interesting twists. While in office, Mnuchin, the super-wealthy former Goldman Sachs financier, got married to the Scottish model and actress, Louise Linton. She is 18 years his junior, and confessed in a glossy magazine interview that their personalities are polar opposites (which sort of begs the famous Mrs Merton question, ‘What first attracted you to the multi-millionaire Steve Mnuchin?’).

  It was reported that he had requested a military jet to fly him and his new bride to their European honeymoon over the summer, a revelation that raised a whole series of questions about the wealthy couple’s use of government aircraft. Mnuchin would confirm that his staff had explored the idea as a way of ensuring that he had access to secure communications and information while he travelled abroad. He would say “I never asked the government to pay for my personal travel.’ And claimed the story was misreported.

  This came after an even more extraordinary episode when he flew with Louise Linton on a private government jet to visit Fort Knox in Kentucky. On her Instagram account, Ms Linton posted a photo of her walking down the steps from the blue and white government plane, tagging all the different haute couture designers she was wearing – a Valentino this, a Hermes that, a Tom Ford something else. When a member of the public upbraided her for this, with the comment ‘Glad we could pay for your little getaway’, the Treasury Secretary’s wife gave the woman both barrels:

  ‘Adorable! Do you think the US govt paid for our honeymoon or personal travel?! Lololol. Have you given more to the economy than me and my husband? Either as an individual earner in taxes OR in self-sacrifice to your country? I’m pretty sure we paid more taxes toward our day “trip” than you did. Pretty sure the amount we sacrifice per year is a lot more than you’d be willing to sacrifice if the choice was yours.’

  And then, with a patronising, supercilious, lip-curled flourish, she added this:

  ‘You’re adorably out of touch … Thanks for the passive aggressive nasty comment. Your kids look very cute. Your life looks cute.’

  Inside Fort Knox, the happy couple would pose holding a newly minted sheet of uncut bank notes, with his signature on each dollar bill. For the photo she wore elbow length black leather gloves, and pouted at the camera. People joked that they looked either like a gangster and his moll, or a Bond villain and accomplice. But where they really flew too close to the sun was, well, where they really flew too close to the sun. The day they chose to fly to Fort Knox on 15 November 2017 was special in one other respect. It was – coincidentally – the same day that certain parts of America would witness a rare total eclipse of the sun. And – guess what? – where they were going in Kentucky was on the line of totality. So the obvious conclusion was drawn – what a perfect day to be flying to Kentucky in a private jet and to witness, at 36,000 feet, the sun being blotted out by the moon. Mnuchin strenuously denied that this had played any part in his decision to go that day.

  There are a number of things remarkable about these collective lapses or near lapses into what might be termed ‘sleazy’ behaviour. The first and most obvious is just how many cabinet members were caught up in any number of questionable episodes, over such a short period of time. This isn’t a catalogue of scandal that unfolded over the eight years of a two-term president. This is inside the first couple of years.

  One other thing about the Trump team was just how incredibly wealthy it was. It was flush with billionaires, multi-millionaires – oh, and a smattering of generals. It was the richest group ever assembled. The joke was you either needed to have bread or braid to get into a Trump cabinet. Presumably the military men were the poorest of those who sat round the famous table, but it should be recorded that none of them was caught up in any of these scandals. One of the great advantages of a cabinet not drawn from the legislature is that you can appoint people who are genuine experts in their own field and who aren’t desperately trying to learn the subject on the job.

  The other big plus is that there aren’t the same pressures as in, say, the British system, to hold regular reshuffles, so that the young tyros get their chance to shine – the parliamentary under-secretary who wants to be a minister of state, before getting a promotion to secretary of state and a seat at the cabinet. In the British system this is about party management and discipline. If you’re the prime minister you reward with promotion those backbenchers who stay in line, are hardworking and stay out of trouble; your power of patronage means you can block and marginalise those who are nuisances, lazy and cause you headaches. In the British system you are also seeking to balance the different factions within the governing party. Look at Theresa May and the desperate efforts she made to keep some kind of balance between Euro-sceptics and ‘Remainers’ during the tortuous Brexit process. Even a prime minister like the ‘Iron Lady’, Margaret Thatcher – who certainly didn’t have the authority issues that Theresa May had – nevertheless had to manage the party’s rival wings. She was never able to purge completely the ‘wets’ from her cabinet, much though she might have liked to.

  The US president has no such concerns. He can pick the brightest and the best; those whose experience in business, academia or public service makes them the obvious choice to oversee one of the great government departments. With some in Donald Trump’s cabinet you could see exactly why they had been chosen. James Mattis was a four-star Marine Corps general, who had been head of Central Command under the Obama administration; he was a pillar of the defence establishment. (What also endeared him to Donald Trump was his nickname: he was known as Jim ‘Mad Dog’ Mattis – Trump would relish introducing him at rallies, hamming up the ‘mad dog’ bit for all it was worth.)

  His Commerce Secretary, Wilbur Ross, had been known as
the ‘king of bankruptcy’ before being brought into the administration. He was like the Richard Gere character in Pretty Woman – though not quite as good-looking. He bought distressed and failing companies, broke them up and sold them on for a profit, making himself a billionaire in the process. You could see why the President appointed Ross, even though, when he had to make his personal financial disclosures, he was not worth the $2.5 billion that he had previously claimed, and that had earned him a place on Forbes Magazine’s billionaires list. Poor old Ross was only worth $700 million. A pauper really. Although during the government shutdown at the end of 2018 and the beginning of 2019, when federal workers went six weeks without pay, he didn’t exactly show his most empathetic side when he questioned why these people needed to queue at food banks for handouts. Cake anyone?

  But some of the others, well, you just had to scratch your head. Betsy DeVos from Michigan had been a major Republican Party donor, and you certainly didn’t need to worry about her name being erased from the Forbes billionaires list. Her husband is listed as America’s 88th richest man. They sit comfortably among America’s super-wealthy. The extent of their wealth became something of a national joke during the summer of 2018 when vandals set adrift from its mooring on Lake Erie the family’s 163-foot yacht, the SeaQuest, worth $40 million. Sympathy was tempered when it was reported that the family owned nine other vessels.

  In her time in Michigan she had been a firm advocate for charter schools, home-schooling and vouchers so that parents can send their children to private schools. But during her confirmation hearings she revealed that neither she nor her children had ever set foot in a state school as students. And her actual knowledge of how state schools operated, how teachers worked and pupils lived was – let us put it kindly – not exactly top of the class. Her confirmation as secretary of education made history: she was the first to be appointed by the casting vote of the Vice-President, Mike Pence (the VP can only cast a tie-breaking vote in the Senate, but is otherwise ineligible to vote). On a visit to America’s biggest school district in New York, DeVos made a deliberate point of not visiting any state schools. This led to what in normal circumstances would have been a career ending car crash of an interview for the programme 60 Minutes. Here is a sample from it: