The Best People

by Alexander Nazaryan

  In his confirmation hearing, Price denied that he had done anything wrong while depicting himself as a doctor immune to Washington’s partisanship. “One of my physician colleagues used to tell me that he never operated on a Democrat patient or a Republican patient, he operated on a patient,” Price said at one point during his testimony. “And that’s the way that I view this system. It’s not a Republican system, it’s not a Democrat system.” His refusal to use the proper possessive, “Democratic,” in favor of the pejorative “Democrat” favored by many of his conservative colleagues, was a small revelation about what he truly believed.

  Democrats on the Senate Finance Committee boycotted the vote over Price’s nomination (as well as Mnuchin’s), but committee chair Orrin Hatch changed the rules so that the vote could proceed without any Democrats present. The full Senate confirmed Price along party lines, with 52 members voting for him and 47 against.

  Now it was time for Price and his former colleagues in Congress to do what they had been promising for nearly a decade. McConnell and Ryan prevailed on Trump to make repeal of the Affordable Care Act his top legislative priority, even though a bipartisan package on infrastructure repair would have been a smarter move on both the political and policy fronts. Smarter, that is, for Trump. McConnell and Ryan needed to justify to their members the years they had devoted to railing against the ACA. Handing over billions to mend highways and bridges was nowhere in the congressional Republican agenda.

  When I asked Trump about his decision not to lead with infrastructure, he gave one of his classically bombastic answers. Infrastructure, he said, “is easy to get. I wanted to get the tax plan done,” referencing the package of tax cuts Congress passed and he signed into law in late 2017. “I’m very much in line with infrastructure,” he added, without offering any evidence to that effect.

  House Republicans introduced the American Health Care Act on March 6, 2017. The next day, Price was trotted out at a White House press briefing. With Press Secretary Sean Spicer watching, Price pointed to a table on which two piles of paper lay, one taller than the other. “Notice how thick that is,” he said of the taller stack, which represented the full text of the Affordable Care Act. The leaner AHCA was evidence, Price argued, that Republicans were “making certain that the process, that the decisions that are gonna be made, are not gonna be made by the federal government. They’re gonna be made by patients, and families and doctors.”

  Price said nothing of how insurance companies would be free to raise premiums or refuse coverage altogether once the protections of the ACA for people with preexisting medical conditions were lifted. But others did. Six days later, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that 23 million Americans would lose their healthcare over a decade if AHCA became law. Republicans discounted these findings as either inaccurate or biased, though the dispassionate analysts of the CBO were neither.

  Even as some Republicans voiced reservations, the AHCA hurtled out of committee and onto the House floor in late March. On March 23, Ryan desperately scrounged for “yeas,” as Trump impatiently waited in the Oval Office for news of impending victory.

  That same evening, Price was at Bullfeathers, the unadorned Capitol Hill bar (“bullfeathers” was Teddy Roosevelt’s sanitized version of “bullshit”), enjoying drinks, as a brief but revealing video posted on social media by an observant citizen showed.

  That a veteran of Congress like Price was not in the Rayburn or Longworth buildings where U.S. representatives were quartered, making a final push, was proof that either he lacked influence or the will to exert it. Either way, Trump would come to see the episode as indicative of Price’s low standing.

  The next day, Ryan pulled the bill.

  Many months later, when the final act of the Price drama was through, a member of the transition expressed regret that he and his colleagues had not “kicked the tires” on Price more thoroughly. To some, he came across as self-regarding yet uninformed. He was supposed to have exerted influence on his former colleagues in Congress, only it turned out there was no influence to exert.

  Not everyone thought he was to blame. Andrew Bremberg, director of the Domestic Policy Council, had worked in Health and Human Services under George W. Bush before becoming an adviser to McConnell. He could have done more, his critics charged, to master the policy details, to sharpen the administration’s arguments while blunting fully predictable congressional opposition. Price, in this view, was not the only one at fault.

  The debacle had several more acts. Frustrated by the House, Senate Republicans started writing their own healthcare bill, a task undertaken by McConnell largely in secret. The bill he released in June, the Better Care Reconciliation Act, was quickly determined by the CBO to imperil the healthcare of twenty-two million Americans.

  If Tom Price’s reputation were a stock, Tom Price would have been selling. In July, right before another ACA vote, President Trump unleashed a weird, unnerving stem-winder on a convention of Boy Scouts in West Virginia. At one point, he summoned onto the stage members of his cabinet who had been Scouts themselves: Ryan Zinke of Interior, goofily dressed in full Scout regalia, Rick Perry of the Department of Energy, and Price.

  As Price came onto the stage, Trump said he hoped that Congress was on its way to “killing this horrible thing known as Obamacare.”

  Perry came over and grabbed Price by the shoulders, then walked away.

  “U-S-A,” the crowd began to chant.

  Price began to clap. Then Trump started clapping, too. Then they were all clapping, while the crowd continued to chant. Everyone was cheering, only nobody seemed to know what they were cheering for.

  The chanting stopped. Trump demanded of Price if he had the requisite votes. “He better get them. He better get them. Oh, he better. Otherwise, I’ll say, ‘Tom, you’re fired,’” Trump growled, reprising his famous Apprentice slogan and gesture. “I’ll get somebody.”

  The threat did little to lift Republican prospects. The McConnell-led repeal effort failed four days later, sunk by Senator John McCain’s dramatic thumbs-down on the Senate floor.

  Two months after the ACA repeal effort collapsed in the Senate, Diamond and Pradhan of Politico published their big scoop on Price: “Price’s private-jet travel breaks precedent.” The report noted that in the previous week alone, Price had taken five separate flights on private jets. The secretary was not jetting to hard-to-reach locales. One of his private flights was from Washington to Philadelphia. This cost, the Politico writers estimated, about $25,000, an expense billed to the American taxpayer. A seat on a regular civilian commercial aircraft would have cost about $400.

  For someone who decried government waste, Price evidently had little compunction about burning through money. He took a trip to Nashville, where he owned a condominium, to spend time with his son. The trip would have cost perhaps $200 on a commercial flight, but Price used a Learjet instead. That left the American people with a $17,760 bill.

  Later, an HHS spokeswoman would offer one of the more preposterous excuses tendered in this age of preposterous excuses for preposterous behavior: “This is Secretary Price, getting outside of D.C., making sure he is connected with the real American people.” Other political leaders found the capital region’s three airports sufficient for such purposes. But this was a billionaire president, presiding over a billionaires’ cabinet. Flying coach was for liberals and rubes.

  Not only did Price abuse the power of his office, but he taunted his own employees back home with chronicles of his exploits, apparently unaware of just how much ire he was inciting. In his “Week in Review” newsletter, he boasted of his travels to the deskbound employees back in Washington whom he and President Trump were threatening with enormous budget cuts. There were dispatches from Liberia and Switzerland. “Hello from Alaska” came an email on an August day that had Washington slogging and sweating through punishing humidity.

  These revelations rattled people who had known Price on Capitol Hill, who once wo
rked with him or for him, who now saw him become a cable news staple for the worst possible reason. Nothing could have predicted this. “I knew Tom when he still had a mustache,” one former congressional staffer who knew Price well said. That was the Price who was closer to Ned Flanders than Donald Trump. Who hosted “family dinners” for junior aides on Capitol Hill. Who believed that government was profligate, and should not be. Where had that Price gone? The former staffer professed confusion. Perhaps he had been enabled. Or maybe he was seduced.

  Whoever Tom Price had been, he was that person no more. In the months he spent trying to take healthcare away from millions of Americans, Price more or less stole $341,000 of taxpayer money (according to a calculation by his own agency’s inspector general) to spend on his lavish travel habits. As the embarrassing stories kept coming, he promised to write a check to the U.S. Treasury for about $51,000. In an interview with Fox News, he said he hoped “to not only regain the trust of the American people, but gain the trust of the administration and the president,” a slavish appeal to Trump that, like all such appeals, was sure to fail.

  The Fox News interview was on Thursday. On Friday, Price was pushed out, the interview having clearly failed to appease Trump, who disliked bad publicity far more than he disliked poor judgment. In his resignation letter, Price assumed a self-righteous tone, describing how he had spent four decades “putting people first,” without mentioning the fortune he’d made in his dubious stock trades. He characterized the ethical questions over his penchant for private jets as nothing more than a “distraction.” He showed no contrition or reflection. Nor would any of the Trump cabinet members who resigned after him.

  Much like his fellow Georgian Newt Gingrich, Tom Price would leave official Washington in disgrace. Whether he returned to Atlanta in first class or coach could not be determined, nor whether decency compelled him to pay for the flight out of his own pocket.

  Chapter 10

  Fellow Travelers

  If there was any comfort Tom Price could take from his plight, it was that he was not alone. Far from it.

  The best politicians understood that voters were swayed by story, not argument. Trump’s most potent, most vivid story was that of draining the swamp. The story was powerful and cathartic, only it suffered from a defect common to political stories, in that it was fiction. Many suspected this from the start, even as others held out hope that Trump would prove the incorruptible iconoclast he played on the campaign trail.

  The counter-narrative of the private jet presidency put an end to all such hopes. It was a story first attached to Price, though like an airborne virus, it quickly spread. The story made people wonder just how deep the swamp in Washington was. If Trump couldn’t drain it, then who could? Unless he’d never truly tried. Unless the whole promise had been little more than a feint, one accompanied by a wink that let his best people act out their worst impulses.

  There were some in the White House who understood this, who did their best to bring Trump’s cabinet into compliance with rules so basic, they should have needed no explaining. But as one person who witnessed those efforts put it, “nobody wanted to be the bad guy.” By the time they finally took decisive action, the narrative of administration-wide corruption dominated the public discourse. It coupled with the narrative of a chaotic West Wing, which Kelly and Porter and others had desperately tried to suppress. This made for great cable television. It did not make for great governing.

  Trump was by no means the first president forced to confront scandals caused by his cabinet members. George H. W. Bush’s chief of staff, John H. Sununu, used military jets seventy-seven times in a period of about two years, a luxury that cost the federal government about half a million dollars. Apparently dissatisfied with the level of dentistry in Washington, he flew twice to see his own dentist in Boston. He flew to a ski resort in Colorado, and to his native New Hampshire. The press deemed him “Air Sununu,” with Newsweek offering the following advice to the combative chief of staff, who had alienated many members of his own party: “If you’re going to make such armies of enemies inside the Beltway, you’d better be sure there are no chinks in your armor.” He did not listen, of course. Nor would many Trump officials, discovering that the self-righteous were rarely afforded an easy path down the road of contrition.

  Bill Clinton tried to head off ethical crises with a memorandum on February 10, 1993, that warned, “taxpayers should pay no more than absolutely necessary to transport Government officials. The public should only be asked to fund necessities, not luxuries, for its public servants.”

  Within just three months of taking office, Clinton was embroiled in his first travel-related scandal, which came to be known as Travelgate. On May 19, 1993, the White House announced that all seven members of its travel office were being fired. When Press Secretary Dee Dee Myers took the podium in the Brady Briefing Room that day and explained that there had been “gross mismanagement,” the White House press corps exploded with indignation.

  As media critic David Shaw of the Los Angeles Times later explained, their anger may not have made sense to the ordinary American, but it made perfect sense to most people in that room. “The travel office smoothed the way for reporters traveling with the President—not only making reservations but arranging for hot meals, communications and overnight laundry service, finding missing baggage, doing the 1,001 small chores that can make the difference between an enjoyable trip and a disastrous one,” Shaw wrote. There were, in other words, legitimate concerns about the travel office firings, which were exacerbated by the grievances of the press.

  Hairgate arrived before Travelgate had a chance to depart the national consciousness. The principal actors in Hairgate were the celebrated hairstylist Cristophe Schatteman and Clinton’s thick, increasingly silver mane. Cristophe—he went by one name, which by 2018 graced an outlet of his salon just a few blocks from the White House—charged $200 for a haircut (it would be $340 by the time Trump took office). This was a presumably fair price, as Cristophe was one of the best-regarded practitioners of his craft in Los Angeles. The only problem was that on May 18, 1993, Cristophe had to practice that craft as Air Force One was sitting on a tarmac at Los Angeles International Airport.

  “It may have been the most expensive haircut in history,” began a New York Times report on the incident. “Two of Los Angeles International Airport’s four runways were shut down for nearly an hour on Tuesday, some incoming flights were delayed and Air Force One sat on the tarmac with engines running.” Back in Washington, the White House was forced “to explain why the populist President tied up one of the country’s busiest airports to have his hair trimmed.”

  In due time, airline records would show this to have been fake news. There were no delays, no crammed jets forced to circle above Los Angeles. There had been a couple of planes routed to other runways, but that was the extent of the inconvenience Clinton caused his fellow Americans as Cristophe snipped away at the president’s locks. But that did not erase the memory of Hairgate, of a sitting president receiving an expensive haircut—from a first-name-only Belgian, no less—while commoners stewed in coach. Story won over facts. Didn’t it always?

  Shaw of the Los Angeles Times explained that Hairgate and Travelgate had become “gates” because members of the media were frustrated with how Clinton was treating them. That frustration seeped into their reporting, making them more likely to inflate minor offenses into flagrant violations.

  But also, the transgressions kept happening. In 1994, David Watkins—a hometown friend whom Clinton brought to the White House, and who was involved in the Travelgate dismissals—decided to commandeer the presidential helicopter Marine One to ferry himself to a golf course in rural Maryland. This was a terrifically bad idea, and Watkins was fired from his job. Clinton managed to make things worse by paying him a $3,000-a-month retainer, taken out of campaign funds, for most of the next year. No amount of goodwill from the press could smooth over a debacle like that.

  Ge
orge W. Bush had travel troubles, too. In 2006, Representative Henry A. Waxman, the powerful Democrat from Southern California, sent a letter to the Office of Management and Budget alleging that during the campaign season two years before, Bush administration officials had taken to traveling around the country in private jets for transparently political purposes. “It is apparent that cabinet secretaries and agency heads are using private aircraft for trips that could more economically occur on commercial aircraft,” Waxman wrote, pointing to “at least 125 trips to more than 300 locations” since 2001, “at a cost to the taxpayer of over $1.5 million.”

  Not all of it may have been improper, but none of it looked good. Rod Paige, the education secretary, had spent $50,290 to fly around the country touting No Child Left Behind, the Bush education reform law. Ann M. Veneman, the agriculture secretary, spent nearly $12,000 to fly on a private plane to Iowa to shill for the Bush tax cuts.

  The greatest offender was Michael O. Leavitt, then the health and human services secretary. As head of the EPA, he had spent about $42,000 on private flights in October 2004, right before the presidential election. One of those trips was to Nevada, where he celebrated a “middle school for its response to a jar of spilled mercury.” Later, as head of HHS, Leavitt took to jetting around the country in a Gulfstream owned by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He flew on the craft nineteen times, charging the federal government $726,048.