Stevieslaw: A Portrait of Scott Pruitt, the Last Happy Man in America

Scott Pruitt, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency is unarguably the most successful of Trump’s cabinet picks. In his brief tenure, he has blocked or postponed more than 30 environmental rules– from curbing pollutants in our waterways to permitting pesticides shown to damage children’s nervous systems.

He is a man of unvarying routine. He arrives at work promptly at 6 AM, driving up in a 1934 Rolls that has been modified to get less than a mile per gallon.

“I took the mufflers out,” he says with a smile.

“At 6:15, I light my first cigarette of the day, he confesses, I smoke nearly 12 packs a day.”

Scott, who smells vaguely of the industrial pollutants and raw sewage he bathes in, notes that he has not and will not meet with any EPA’s 15000 career employees.

“They are superfluous,” he says. “I spend most of my day in conference calls with leaders of the Petrochemical and Energy industries.”

“We decide what regulations to cut next,” he said with a boyish grin.

Scotty takes few breaks. Instead of lunch, he sips on rhamnolipid—a biosurfactant used in the fracking process.

“Dick Cheney sends it over from Halliburton,” he said.

“I will also take some deep breaths of a methane/benzene vapor that I keep in a pressurized tank in my office.” I find it refreshing.

Mr. Pruitt even practices what he preaches on the weekends. He visits his large estate in Virginia at which he burns thousands of old rubber truck tires and releases large quantities of methane into the atmosphere. His one indulgence is a crop-duster, which he uses to spray Glyphosate (the active ingredient in roundup) over all the playgrounds in a 100 mile radius.

Pruitt is not all work, however. Most evenings he can be found in his personal theatre watching old footage of the Cuyahoga River fire in 1969.

“It’s a real classic,” he says.

Pruitt confided in Smokey Diamond, our intrepid reporter, that this is the best job ever and that he is the happiest man on the planet.

“You know when you are a kid and you dream that you are a famous ball player,” he said. “Well I feel like I’m Ty Cobb—my childhood hero and as nasty a piece of work as ever walked the planet.”