Scott Pruitt is still standing, a day after a flurry of bad headlines hit the Environmental Protection Agency chief.
Lobbyists, donors to President Trump and conservative advisers tell the Washington Examiner the decision on whether he stays, or goes, will come down to Trump himself. And the president really likes having Pruitt around.
“I don’t doubt there are people inside EPA or the White House that don’t like Pruitt. But the president likes Pruitt, they are very similar in many ways,” said one industry lobbyist.
Pruitt has been effective in carrying out Trump’s deregulation agenda. From the Paris climate deal exit to this week’s auto emissions rollback, “he has been effective all along,” the industry source said.
Plus, “he looks like a victim of the ‘fake media,’” which Trump likes the most, and the recent stories of taking a sweetheart deal from lobbyists to live in a condominium only creates “more background” that Pruitt has opponents who want to take him down.
The source also says the condominium deal is being overblown as an ethics issue, when it is really a “judgment call.” It is just noise that Trump probably believes Pruitt can get through, the source says.
Dan Eberhart, a Trump donor and oil services magnate, said the condo issue is troubling but Pruitt can overcome it.
“Administrator Pruitt’s short-term housing arrangements seem misguided given the fishbowl of D.C., but I don’t see it as unethical or some ill-gotten financial gain,” Eberhart said in an email. “Overall, I think Pruitt has been a tireless advocate of Trump’s philosophy of rolling back unnecessary business-hampering regulations while balancing the EPA’s mission to protect the environment. And he’s accomplished this in an agency that is hostile to him even being in the building.”
Mike McKenna, a conservative environmental adviser with close ties to the Trump transition team, said the stories likely stem from the White House itself. He believes lesser advisers have it out for Pruitt and are pushing the stories to the media to pressure him to resign.
“Obviously, what’s going on is somebody at the White House has the knives out for the guy, but they must not have the president’s ear, because they’re running this thing through the press, not with the president,” McKenna told the Washington Examiner. But until they have the president’s ear, Pruitt will keep on doing his job, he said.
“The Pruitt crew is looking at this like ‘we’re going to keep our heads down and keep doing our thing,'” McKenna said. “As long as the boss is OK with it, it’s OK.”
White House officials tell the Washington Examiner that Pruitt is safe in his job for now.
A Republican close to the White House described Pruitt Tuesday as “more effective than any other Cabinet secretary, with [Attorney General] Jeff Sessions being the one possible exception.”
But the same source said that neither Pruitt’s track record nor Trump’s phone call guarantees that “he’ll still be around a week from now.”
One senior administration official said Pruitt could survice while former Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin and national security adviser H.R. McMaster couldn’t because rumors about his job security have overshadowed news coverage of Trump’s alleged affair with porn star Stormy Daniels.
“Obviously that won’t last forever,” the official warned.
Trump has offered cryptic comments about his EPA chief since their conversation Monday evening. “I hope he’s going to be great,” the president told reporters during a quadrilateral meeting Tuesday.
