The real reason Donald Trump has ousted EPA boss Scott Pruitt
Long-embattled EPA boss Scott Pruitt has finally “resigned” today, and we put that word in quotation marks becuase cabinet members traditionally always “resign” even when they’ve been fired. It’s fairly clear that Donald Trump forced Pruitt out today. But Pruitt has been a scandal-plagued embarrassment for a very long time. So why is Trump forcing him out now? Why not last month? Why not a month from now? There are some strong hints at play here.
Trump was always going to have to dump Scott Pruitt eventually, as his scandals were only going to become more of a problem. Conventional wisdom suggests that Trump has been waiting to dump Pruitt until he needed to create a distraction from some other ugly story that was about to surface. But Trump began laying the groundwork for Pruitt’s demise on Tuesday. This would mean that Trump has known for the past two days that he was going to need to create a distraction from a bombshell that still has yet to surface.
The mainstream media has long speculated that Trump was keeping Pruitt around as a “Plan B” for Attorney General in case he ever worked up the nerve to fire Jeff Sessions. But as Palmer Report has long pointed out, this never made any sense, as the scandal-plagued Pruitt would have had no chance of being confirmed for Attorney General by the Senate. We now know that Pruitt was delusional enough to think he could get the job, but Trump surely knew this was never an option. So we don’t believe Pruitt’s ouster is related to Sessions or the Trump-Russia probe.
Donald Trump has announced today that Pruitt’s deputy will run the EPA for now, making a point of stressing that the deputy has already been confirmed by the Senate. This suggests that Trump has no plans to nominate the deputy or anyone else on a permanent basis, for fear that the Democrats in the Senate would use the confirmation hearings to further expose Pruitt’s scandals. If so, it means Trump is already at a desperation point where he’s no longer going to bother replacing cabinet members who are ousted.
