permafrost wrote:
You can not make the orange man look like the scum he is and keep you good govt job...
Less than an hour before Donald Trump fired accepted the resignation of Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price, the President made very clear why his Cabinet secretary was being let go.
"I don't like the optics," Trump said, adding: "We're renegotiating NAFTA, we renegotiating so many things and making much better deals. You'll be seeing other things come up. So I don't like to see somebody that perhaps there's the perception that it wasn't right."
Just in case you missed the point, Trump also noted: "I was disappointed because I didn't like it, cosmetically or otherwise."
"Optics." "Perception." "Cosmetically."
You get the idea.
Price was fired not because of the more than two dozen private flights he took at taxpayer expense. He was fired because he violated Trump's first principle: Never, ever make the boss look bad -- especially in the press.
Price had become a major distraction for Trump and his White House. On a week that Trump wanted the focus to be on his tax reform proposal, Price made the storyline all about how the President wasn't draining the swamp as promised. (Yes, Trump also picked a fight with the NFL, got caught flat-footed on the humanitarian crisis in Puerto Rico and saw his preferred candidate lose a Senate race in Alabama. But Trump isn't going to blame Trump for a bad week. Come on! Pay attention!)
Unlike, say, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, who has had his fair share of private plane issues too, Price lacked the personal relationship with Trump that might have saved him. Whereas Mnuchin was a wealthy New Yorker (like Trump), Price was a southern doctor who had spent more than a decade in Congress. He was not, and is not, uber-rich.
Trump then carried no real personal loyalty or investment in Price. And so, when Price started generating bad headlines, he was already starting in a bad place. He made things worse with his attempted defense of his private plane penchant -- noting that he had sought the approval of the administration before each of the flights and offering to pay $52,000 back to the government to cover the cost of his seat on these planes.
You can not make the orange man look like the scum... (
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