The Best People

by Alexander Nazaryan

  Clement briefed Zinke once, sometime in the spring of 2017 (he could not remember the exact date). Of the issues traditionally covered by Interior, the only one Zinke appeared to be curious about was invasive species. As it happened, a species of invasive mussel—the zebra mussel—had been discovered in Montana. Another senior staffer who was invited to brief Zinke asked Clement to attend.

  It was widely known around Interior that Zinke, like Trump, was not fond of reading briefing materials. But Clement and the other staffer found Zinke in some land far beyond unprepared. At one point, Zinke interrupted the briefing to offer that the invasive species problem could not be solved until all ravens and coyotes were killed. The staffers were stunned. They thought their boss was not just uninformed but possibly insane. He was also graceless, mocking Clement for having attended the University of Virginia, one of the best public colleges in the country.

  Like so many other members of the Trump administration, Zinke encountered his most formidable enemy in his own hubris. That hubris manifested itself in the way he traveled. In March 2017, Zinke used private planes to travel to the U.S. Virgin Islands, where he attended a fund-raiser. That June, he flew to Las Vegas to give a motivational speech to the city’s professional hockey team, the Golden Knights. The team was owned by William P. Foley II, a major supporter of Zinke’s political career. After the talk, Zinke and his staffers flew from Las Vegas to Montana. They did so on a private jet owned by energy-industry executives. The jet was not provided to Zinke free of charge: he left the federal government with a $12,000 bill.

  Zinke liked helicopters. That same summer, he spent $8,000 on a helicopter flight to reach Shepherdstown, West Virginia, in time for an emergency management exercise. He could have easily driven, but then he would have missed the Washington swearing-in of fellow Montanan Greg Gianforte, a donor to Zinke’s campaigns who, in the midst of his own House race, body-slammed a reporter for daring to ask a question. Zinke also took a helicopter ride from Virginia to Washington so that he would not miss a horse-riding session with Vice President Mike Pence in Rock Creek Park. That cost $6,250, half of what the U.S. spends on education per child per year.

  As wildfires burned across the West in the summer of 2017, Zinke thought it a good idea to take a helicopter ride over Nevada. The tour cost $40,000, an expense paid for out of funds reserved for fighting wildfires. The trip did not take Zinke to areas that had been damaged by the fires. Confronted with this inconvenient detail by Newsweek, Interior tried to lie about Zinke’s intentions, then all but admitted that he had wasted valuable emergency funds in search of airborne amusement.

  Like his fellow department chief Steve Mnuchin, Zinke enjoyed husband-and-wife travel at taxpayers’ expense. When Zinke and his wife Lola went to Turkey and Greece to celebrate their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, an interior security detail went along, though the trip had nothing to do with the agency or its business. Unwisely, Lola Zinke documented the trip on Twitter.

  Lola Zinke took several other trips with her husband—to California, Alaska—the couple deftly erasing the line between official business and pleasure travel. This did not surprise interior staffers who had seen the Zinkes together. One employee of the National Park Service remembered how Zinke came to Yosemite National Park, in California, where she worked. During the visit, Zinke addressed employees in a large warehouse with a metal roof. It was storming outside, and his audience had trouble hearing him. Someone asked him to use the microphone. Zinke bristled at the suggestion: he would simply speak louder, so confident was he in the power of his masculine timbre. A few moments later, Lola told him to speak into a microphone. The cowboy quickly complied. Minor as the incident was, it stuck with the Yosemite staffer as one of those small moments that revealed something about a person’s character.

  Zinke took, and he also took away. Even though his rhetoric championed the ordinary American, his actions consistently favored corporate concerns. It was the latter that were going to fund future political ambitions, which Zinke harbored just as much as Pruitt. He turned the Interior Department into a reverse philanthropy, one that gave away to oil and gas companies natural treasures that belonged to the American people.

  Only, the people who worked for him kept getting in the way. While Zinke could, and did, stock the upper reaches of the department with political appointees ready to do his bidding, he could do nothing about the seventy thousand employees who were tasked with protecting the nation’s natural and cultural resources. Many of these employees worked in national parks or on Native American reservations. They rescued hikers from desert parks like Joshua Tree; they oversaw gaming operations that generated hundreds of millions of dollars. The people who did this work were not concerned with whether Zinke imagined himself as Montana’s future governor or a Washington energy lobbyist. They had jobs to do.

  Much like Trump, Zinke understood that federal employees were his enemy, if only because his own intentions were in such flagrant contravention to what public service entailed. “I got 30 percent of the crew that’s not loyal to the flag,” Zinke complained in a speech to the National Petroleum Council in September 2017. He said he was tired of his agenda being stalled in a “holding pattern” by interior employees. That agenda, as he explained in the speech, came from the White House, and involved effacing regulations that stood in industry’s way. “The president wants it yesterday,” Zinke warned.

  Those who did not share this urgency were bullied out of the department. Clement left Interior that October. Several months earlier, he had been transferred to the Office of Natural Resources Revenue, where he was to audit payments to the federal government made by energy companies. This was not only a demotion but an insult, a reminder to Clement that his side had lost the political and ideological battle over global warming. In his resignation letter, Clement charged that Zinke “unlawfully retaliated” against him “for disclosing the perilous impacts of climate change upon Alaska Native communities.”

  Zinke continued to present himself as a conservationist in the mold of Theodore Roosevelt, despite the fact that his actions were in screaming opposition to everything Roosevelt stood for. That was never more apparent than in Zinke’s approach to two national monuments in Utah: Grand Staircase–Escalante and Bears Ears.

  In 1906, Roosevelt had signed the Antiquities Act, which allowed the president to protect land as a national monument, meaning it would be free from commercial exploitation. This was an “easier” designation than a national park, the creation of which required an act of Congress. Clinton had created Grand Staircase–Escalante, an archeological wonderland, in 1996; in 2016, Obama signed Bears Ears into existence to protect land spiritually significant to the Navajo, Hopi, and other Native American tribes in that area. In all, Obama used the Antiquities Act to create twenty-nine national monuments covering 553 million acres.

  What was done by presidential decree could be undone by the same. In April 2017, Trump signed Executive Order 13792, which mandated that the Department of the Interior “review” twenty-seven national monuments designated in the previous twenty years. Eager to please the president, Zinke pushed for a report that praised Trump for ordering the review. The report argued that only the president “has the authority to make protective land designations outside of the narrow scope of the Act.”

  Zinke’s report recommended that ten national monuments be reduced in size. The recommendation ignored overwhelming evidence that much of the land lacked commercial worth and was far more valuable as a conserved natural, cultural, and archeological resource. This became plain in the summer of 2018, when interior officials accidentally sent unredacted emails to journalists and environmental groups. Those emails showed that Zinke and his top aides minimized the benefits of keeping lands public while exaggerating the benefits of making those lands private.

  By the time these emails came to light, the report in question had been submitted to Trump, and he had taken the action just about everyone expected him to take. In Dec
ember 2017, he became the first president since Kennedy to shrink national monuments designated by his predecessors. Only two monuments were cut, but the cuts were drastic. Grand Staircase went from 1.9 million to 1 million acres. Bears Ears suffered an even greater diminution, from 1.3 million acres to just 228,000.

  Zinke could do nothing to shrink national parks, which were the purview of Congress. But he did attempt to make them less accessible. In March 2018, Zinke proposed raising fees to enter seventeen of the nation’s most popular national parks. The new cost of entry would be seventy dollars, and Zinke justified it by explaining that if “you give discounted or free passes to elderly, fourth graders, veterans, disabled and you do it by the carload, there’s not a whole lot of people who actually pay at our front door.” Trying to squeeze an extra buck from old people and war veterans did not square with Trump’s populism, feigned as that populism may have been. A year later, the Interior Department finally ruled that it would raise the entrance fee to the seventeen national parks, but by all of five dollars.

  Making public land inaccessible to the public seemed to constitute the whole of Zinke’s vision for the Department of Interior. During his confirmation hearing, Zinke promised not to sell off public lands. In the narrowest sense, he kept his word. In reality, the promise was fiction.

  In 2017, Zinke’s Bureau of Land Management offered 10.3 million acres for leasing in Alaska’s National Petroleum Reserve. Comprised of nine hundred separate lots, this was the biggest offering of land for leasing ever made by the BLM. Interest in the land was comparatively nonexistent, given the extremely low price of oil and the increasing dominance of both natural gas and renewable sources like wind and solar. In the end, only seven of the nine hundred lots were leased, for a total of 79,998 acres going to industry. Alaska, which was to benefit greatly from the sale—states split revenue with the Treasury—received all of $579,678.50, a fraction of what American taxpayers paid every time Trump decided to spend the weekend at Mar-a-Lago.

  Zinke was not deterred by this poor showing. In 2018, he offered 2.4 million acres for leasing. This was less than what had been offered in 2017, but these were in far more accessible states in the intermountain West. About half, or 1.1 million acres, were in Wyoming, but there were also 535,000 acres offered in Utah, 295,000 in Nevada, and 236,000 in Colorado, along with smaller parcels in New Mexico, Montana, and Arizona. Some of the parcels were near national monuments and national parks, including Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona, Canyonlands National Park in Utah, and Dinosaur National Monument in Colorado.

  Many of these lands were also in sage grouse habitat. The lordly, spike-tailed bird, which lived in the high desert of the West, had had its population so drastically diminished, that President Obama considered enacting protections under the Endangered Species Act. To avoid the kinds of restrictions federal action would bring, the Interior Department struck a deal with western states in 2015. The sage grouse remained off the endangered species list, but only as long as federal agencies working with states implemented management plans, ninety-eight of them in all, to protect the bird and the wild lands it relied on.

  Zinke ordered those plans reviewed in June 2017, indicating that he was preparing to offer some of the land set aside for sage grouse to energy or mineral-extraction companies. “Zinke might as well have formed a shotgun posse to kill off the sage grouse directly,” a conservationist quipped darkly to the New York Times. Zinke had no known personal animosity toward the bird. The sage grouse simply stood in the way of greater development of open lands across the West. Like the spotted owl of the Pacific Northwest or the desert tortoise of inland Southern California, the sage grouse represented interests that had conviction but lacked money, interests that loved the land, not only what could be taken from it.

  Aware that leasing land across the West could prove highly unpopular, BLM did what it could to silence the chorus of dissatisfied voices it rightly knew to expect. A thirty-day comment period on any proposed lease was canceled, and the time to file an administrative protest for a proposed lease already in the works was reduced to a mere ten days. During the Obama administration, the total time for both comment and protest had been sixty days.

  Not only that, but interior officials who worked in parks and national monuments were pressured to make land available for leasing, even when it was clear that studding that land with oil derricks and mining equipment would not only tarnish the landscape but drive away the millions of tourists, both foreign and domestic, who came to see the unspoiled West each year.

  “Why in the world, for a short-term gain, would you jeopardize those places by doing something stupid?” wondered Walt Dabney, who served as a park ranger for many decades. He lived in Moab, Utah, which periodically filled with tourists from the world over. The tourists brought millions to the local economy, and they did not “boom-and-bust like the oil and gas business.” Energy-related development would lead them to vacation elsewhere, Dabney was certain. A true man of the West, he was not against energy extraction. He was only against doing things quickly, unthinkingly, maliciously. People who did things quickly and unthinkingly did not last long out in the sagebrush sea.

  The Zinke plan proceeded apace, even as the opposition of conservationists, sportsmen, and other opposing parties grew louder. Their voices were joined by those of western governors, local officials, and representatives of Native American tribes. But the man who styled himself a modern-day Teddy Roosevelt would not be deterred from doing what he could to dismantle Roosevelt’s legacy. In September 2018, the lease of federal lands garnered $972 million, in good part because the offerings were in New Mexico’s oil-rich Permian Basin. Zinke touted this as an example of “American energy dominance.”

  Yet as 2019 approached, Zinke looked ever more like he was about to pull a Pruitt. The number of investigations into his behavior topped a dozen, never a good sign. There was also a touch of the bizarre, as if Pruitt had not provided enough of that. In early November, Zinke summoned the U.S. Park Police because a neighbor complained about an idling car that was taking up three parking spots. This wasn’t exactly on par with looking for a used mattress from the Trump Hotel—though one of Zinke’s associates did attempt to resolve the situation by pretending to be Zinke himself—but it was close.

  There were more serious matters at hand. In August 2018, Politico reported that Zinke entered into what looked to be a wildly illegal arrangement with the chairman of Halliburton, who intended to build a brewery on land Zinke owned in Whitefish (operating a brewery was a longstanding Zinke goal; in fact, it may have been the most worthwhile goal he had).

  Around Halloween, posters began to appear in downtown Washington, including near Interior’s headquarters. They showed Zinke as “Count Corruption,” outfitted like a vampire. Around him flew black bats whose bellies were sacks of cash. At the bottom of the poster was a hashtag: #FireZinke.

  Reporters were now frequently asking about Zinke, just as months before they’d been asking about Pruitt. This irritated Trump. He was supposed to be the news, not his cabinet secretaries. And if cabinet secretaries were going to be in the news, why could they not make news for something other than corruption? “Certainly, I would not be happy with that at all,” Trump said about the allegations that Zinke had improper dealings with the Halliburton chairman. “I’ll take a look,” the president added ominously.

  Then, in a tweet that came on a raw December morning in Washington, Trump announced that Zinke was leaving his administration. It was a near certainty that he, like Pruitt, would be replaced by someone more capable, someone who could take apart and give away the Department of Interior without indulging his cowboy fantasies.

  Ryan Zinke cast himself as the victim of “vicious and politically motivated attacks.” Like Pruitt, he saw himself as a martyr, felled for his bravery in the face of conniving bureaucrats and conspiring liberals. His own shortcomings had nothing to do with it.

  Chapter 13

  Attendant L
ords

  If someone set your house on fire, you weren’t likely to notice that they also trampled your vegetable garden. In the time of Trump, the fires came hot and fast. Daily, Americans woke to wonder if the president’s early morning tweets had brought the nation closer to nuclear war with North Korea or Iran. Daily they debated if a vault deep in the Kremlin contained a tape of Trump consorting with Russian prostitutes. Nightly they marveled that somehow the rivets of the republic held, despite the tweetstorms hurled against its sides, the threats of impeachment, the shouted anxieties that the end of the American project was finally at hand.

  And would it survive yet another day after that? You couldn’t know a thing like that, not anymore, so you went to bed queasy with dread, already expecting the next morning’s tweets, the crisis that would come on a Wednesday afternoon, which in another time, under another president, might have passed without a single breaking news alert.

  But if this was all a crisis for some, it was an opening for others, namely those who considered public service a means to private enrichment. There were all too many such people in the Trump administration, who saw the daily firestorms engendered by the president as a perfect opportunity to engage in sustained campaigns of unbridled corruption, to plunder the house as it burned. There were such people in every presidential administration, because avarice never had a political lean. Only, never before had such people been so emboldened. Never before had they felt so free.

  Three cabinet members stood out in this respect: Steve Mnuchin (Treasury), Ben Carson (Housing and Urban Development), and Wilbur Ross (Commerce). If history is to remember them at all, it will be only for the shame they brought on the offices they held. They were the “attendant lords” the poet T. S. Eliot savaged in his most widely known work, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” men who were, in Eliot’s perfectly cutting words, “Deferential, glad to be of use,” even if they were faintly aware that they were “almost ridiculous.”