Pruitt has stepped down as head of the Environmental Protection Agency and his ideological allies have already crafted a narrative: Pruitt, they claim, was the victim of a leftist witch hunt. Prominent conservative pundits weighed in on this theme:
Lesson to other Trump officials from Pruitt resignation: Give the left/media/organized greens any molehill and they will turn it into K2. Most of the accusations were overwrought, but the barrage was overwhelming. Let's hope an equally reformist successor denies them a repeat.
— Kimberley Strassel (@KimStrassel) July 5, 2018
Scott Pruitt is a good friend and a very good man, caricatured by left and MSM. I hope he sets to work on a memoir ASAP and deals out a tenth of what he took. He’s a man of great faith and perseverance so he probably won’t, but the attacks on his family were unconscionable. https://t.co/Ob69m6fctg
— Hugh Hewitt (@hughhewitt) July 5, 2018
Well funded and media coordinated #bootpruitt movement finally gets its scalp. Would have taken hours, not months, in a typical GOP admin but now that it has had its success, expect it to be repeated with other Trump cabinet officials.
— Mollie (@MZHemingway) July 5, 2018
These arguments fail to engage with a simple fact: Scott Pruitt was the subject of more than a dozen ongoing investigations. One investigation already concluded he broke the law when he purchased a $43,000 secure phone booth without notifying Congress. The scale of Pruitt’s alleged corruption, in terms of the sheer number of infractions he might be guilty of, is without precedent in a cabinet official in modern American history.
Emily Atkin noted in The New Republic in April that the snowballing scandals around Pruitt were met by the conservative press with either silence or irrelevant whataboutism. “The conservative news sites that do mention Pruitt’s scandals are either very brief or highlight Trump’s support for him,” Atkin observed.
This trend seems to be continuing even after Pruitt’s resignation.