Scott Pruitt Smells Like the Ritz

Finally, Scott Pruitt’s mission on this warming and environmentally degraded planet — his destiny, if you will — has come into focus. It’s not merely to pollute. It’s not simply to grift. It’s not to distill, in one compressed male form, the cupidity and corruption associated with government at its rottenest.

It’s to do all of that while fragrant and moist. And so, according to a report Thursday in The Washington Post, he had the beleaguered members of his bloated security detail drive him from one Ritz-Carlton to another in pursuit of a favorite lotion available at that fancy hotel chain.

The heart wants what it wants. So, apparently, does the epidermis.

I’ve been hesitant to devote an entire column to Pruitt, the morally squalid head of the Environmental Protection Agency, because whenever you think that the final stratum of muck about him has been dredged up, you learn that there’s another fetid layer lower down. His ethical transgressions, unlike the fossil fuels that he champions, are a renewable resource.

Americans crave answers — and deserve them. Mainly they want to know how Pruitt perseveres, soldiering through the mortifications and shrugging off the investigations, with skin as thick as it is luxuriantly lubricated. Where does he get the strength to slither out of bed each day and face a flabbergasted and repulsed world anew? And why hasn’t President Donald Trump canned him already?

I cannot help with the first question, but I’m all over the second.

I can tell you that Pruitt’s saving grace isn’t his disregard for America’s land and water, though that helps. Some big-money and small-government types who stand by Trump treasure Pruitt as an unswerving ideologue who has never met a regulation that he was reluctant to dismantle, a toxin that he was loath to disseminate or a special interest that he wouldn’t envelop in a bear hug, provided that there’s something in the embrace — money, or maybe just moisturizer — for him.

Possibly Pruitt gets an assist from God. He professes to be deeply religious. That facet of his persona doesn’t get as much attention as others, largely because it’s so dissonant with his determination to notch all seven deadly sins. By my tally he’s more than halfway there, having definitely covered greed, gluttony, envy and pride. Only three to go.

He’s a deacon of his Baptist congregation back home in Oklahoma. He was a trustee of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He has disputed evolution, saying that there are not “sufficient scientific facts” to prove it, and he has spoken of years spent “earnestly praying” and “asking the question I don’t think we ask enough: God, what do you want to do with me?” The answer, apparently, was tuck him in a special soundproof phone booth at the EPA. Pruitt ordered the construction of one. It cost $43,000.

Conservative Christians somehow see him as one of their own, and Trump sees conservative Christians as crucial, loyal disciples. This works powerfully in Pruitt’s favor.

But it’s not his ultimate inoculation or absolution. He benefits principally from the fact that the very behavior of his that’s an insult to decency is a compliment to Trump: It draws on Trump’s traits and attests to Pruitt’s ambition to ascend to the boss’ regal level and be just like him. In that sense Pruitt’s defects amount to a tribute. Where you see a pathetic scammer, Trump sees a pipsqueak version of himself.

From a certain demented angle, it’s almost poignant. Pruitt wants to sleep on a Trump-branded mattress because he dreams Trump-branded dreams. The unnecessary lights and sirens that Pruitt requests for his motorcade mirror the necessary ones that the president doesn’t even have to demand.

The costly routing of so many supposedly work-oriented trips through Oklahoma so that Pruitt can spend a self-indulgent amount of time back home: Doesn’t that recall the president’s constant breaks at his resorts in Florida and New Jersey?

The phone booth, the body guards, the $3.5 million on security during Pruitt’s first year in the job and his move to acquire specially armored vehicles: Don’t they bespeak a paranoia and imperiousness on a par with the president’s?

As a businessman Trump was known for finagling suspicious bargains and fleeing steep bills, all in the interests of getting more for less, living larger than he otherwise might and enriching himself. Pruitt’s $50-a-night condo in Washington, courtesy of an energy lobbyist’s wife, was like a Trump real-estate deal on training wheels.

And his first-class plane tickets, remember, weren’t the whole or the worst of his high-flying ambitions. Two administration officials told The Times about a proposal — eventually scuttled — to buy a $100,000-a-month charter aircraft membership so that Pruitt could use private jets for his official government business. You could consider it a fun-size Air Force One.

Perhaps that’s why Pruitt is set on smelling like the Ritz.