At what point did Tom Price, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, who was forced to resign on Friday after a series of Politico stories on his flights on private-charter and military planes, become too much for Donald Trump? Perhaps it was when Price proved inept at bluffing his way out of a scandal. On Thursday, Price had said, in a statement, “The taxpayers won’t pay a dime for my seat on those planes.” He would, he said, write a personal check immediately. By then, Politico had uncovered twenty-six private flights that together cost taxpayers more than four hundred thousand dollars. That included a trip between Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia, and one between D.C. and Nashville (where Price’s son lives, coincidentally). But the check Price wrote was only for fifty-one thousand dollars and change, which he had, by some means, decided was his fair “portion.” In other words, “won’t pay a dime” meant that taxpayers would get about a dime back for every dollar spent. That didn't sound like much of a bargain.
And that was before Politico reported, on Thursday night, that Price had apparently spent another half a million dollars taking military planes. One of his predecessors, Kathleen Sebelius, told Politico that, during her five years in the job, she never flew military aircraft, and took only commercial flights. Sylvia Burwell, another former H.H.S. secretary, seems to have used a military plane only for trips to Cuba. Price used a military plane between Berlin and Geneva, at a cost of sixteen thousand dollars, for an hour-and-a-half trip. Would many people in the business-class section of a commercial flight between those two cities even have known who he was? He would have been more likely to be recognized boarding the private plane that, according to Politico, he booked to take himself and his wife from North Carolina to St. Simons Island, Georgia, where they have some real estate, on a Friday afternoon in August. There was, he explained, a medical conference in the area at which he spoke that Sunday—two days after the private flight.
If the “won’t pay a dime” offer was a gambit to keep his job, Price’s bid was much too low. Trump, who named Don J. Wright, the director of the Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, as the acting Secretary, never appeared to be behind Price. When asked on Wednesday about Price’s flights, the President said, “I will tell you, personally, I’m not happy about it. I am not happy.” When Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, was asked if Price’s job was secure, she demurred, saying that an inspector general’s review was under way; she also said that the President was “not thrilled.” Price, meanwhile, kept repeating that all the trips had been approved in advance—which only made the whole story more embarrassing for the Administration. When Bret Baier, of Fox News, asked Price on Thursday if he was worried about losing his job, Price said that he knew that he would have to work to “not only regain the trust of the American people but gain the trust of the Administration and the President.”
But what does it mean to have this President’s trust? Trump is not a man who has a philosophical problem with private indulgences, or with financial self-dealing. He hired Price even though, as a member of the House Ways and Means Committee’s health subcommitee, he had traded in the stocks of companies whose drugs he helped regulate. As with the flights, his defense was that this was normal behavior in Washington. Maybe the offense was Price’s presumption, as much as his profligacy. Perhaps the failure of the Obamacare repeal, which Price was supposed to help make the case for, left him with too little in the bank with Trump. Price’s lavish spending is particularly notable given that he has pushed for deep cuts in Medicaid and for reducing the H.H.S. budget by nearly a fifth. But those are the President's positions, and his hypocrisies, too. In the end, Trump may have just recognized how easy it was to beat up on Price on this point, and wanted to get in on the action.
It is not as though the plane escapade is out of character for members of this Administration. The Treasury Secretary, Steven Mnuchin, who is a very wealthy man, asked for a military jet for his honeymoon, though he later withdrew the request. He did take a government plane to Kentucky, something that came to light when his wife, Louise Linton, posted a picture on Instagram of them disembarking. The timing also suggested that Mnuchin and Linton had taken the plane to catch this summer’s solar eclipse at the point of totality. Mnuchin brushed that idea away by saying that he wasn’t interested in the eclipse because “I’m a New Yorker” (thereby proving that he’s not one anymore, really), and because the available eclipse glasses struck him as alarmingly down-market. (“They’re like paper glasses. I’m, like, ‘I’m worried I’m going to get my eyes burned out,’ ” he said.) Politico also found that the Secretary of the Interior, Ryan Zinke, and Scott Pruitt, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, took a number of private and military flights. Zinke spent twelve thousand dollars getting from Las Vegas to an airport near his home in Montana. According to Politico, his public business in Montana consisted of stopping by a meeting of Western governors; he was then “the subject of a photo shoot with GQ magazine at Lake McDonald and fished while being interviewed by Outside Magazine.” Another one of his flights, in March, was between two Caribbean islands.
“What were you thinking?” Baier asked Price about, specifically, the D.C.-Philadelphia flight. “We had a meeting that morning on the hurricanes,” Price said. Had the winds closed the roads to Philadelphia? In any event, that meeting doesn’t seem to have yielded much for the millions of American citizens in Puerto Rico. Price also said that the opioid crisis justified a number of his private-plane trips, but the Administration has still not delivered an emergency declaration on the issue, which it promised to do nearly two months ago. There is something shameless about using real crises to justify personal extravagances. When Mnuchin was asked, amid the Price tumult this week, if he would continue to use military planes, he said that he might if it were a matter of “national security.” That sounds conservative, except that Mnuchin has said that more than half his time is spent on national security—and that the honeymoon request was “purely about national security”—because the Treasury Department deals with things like sanctions and money laundering. Mnuchin needs to avoid commercial flights, in other words, so that he is available to fight terrorists.
Mnuchin, Zinke, and Pruitt all still have their jobs. One effect of the Price firing, though, may be to create the sort of situation that Trump seems to like best, in which those around him are uncertain about their futures and their statuses. An appealing aspect of such an environment, for Trump, is that it is a hothouse for flattery. Mnuchin spent part of Sunday praising Trump’s attacks on the N.F.L. Price’s other explanation, to Baier, for his private flights was that he had been caught up in “trying our doggonedest to be able to accomplish the mission, to make certain that we did all we could do to advance the President’s agenda.” Trump was, he said, “a remarkable leader.” In his resignation letter, he said that he had become a “distraction.” Maybe, if he sounds sorry enough, Price can get a ride out of Washington on his ex-boss’s plane.
