Chief of Staff Advised a Resistant Trump to Fire the EPA Chief

Earlier, in a brief interview, Ms. Sanders said that Mr. Pruitt’s success in achieving items on the president’s agenda — including rolling back a large number of environmental regulations — may weigh heavily as a counterbalance to allegations that he misused taxpayer dollars.

“He likes the work product,” she said of Mr. Trump.

Conservatives have, for the most, part rallied around Mr. Pruitt, but late Friday saw the first signs of a fissure.

Representative Trey Gowdy, Republican of South Carolina and the chairman of the House Oversight Committee, has started to investigate Mr. Pruitt’s condo deal, an aide to the committee confirmed.

Mr. Gowdy is already investigating Mr. Pruitt’s first-class travel. This week, the committee was provided two memos from the E.P.A.’s designated ethics official related to the administrator’s living arrangements, the aide said.

Asked about Mr. Pruitt at an event on Friday evening, Mr. Gowdy said, “I don’t have a lot of patience for that kind of stuff. You’ve got to be a good steward of taxpayer dollars,” according to a video an activist took of the interaction that was distributed by Friends of the Earth, an environmental group.

Mr. Pruitt has been dogged by a series of scandals in recent weeks, including revelations that he rented a condominium co-owned by the wife of an energy lobbyist for $50 per night; that he spent more than $100,000 on taxpayer-funded first-class travel, which the E.P.A. has argued was necessary because of security concerns; and that the agency sidelined or demoted at least five high-ranking agency employees who had raised questions about his spending.

The Wall Street Journal first reported Mr. Kelly’s unheeded advice to Mr. Trump, which marked the escalation of a quiet, but intense, turn in the West Wing against Mr. Pruitt. Privately, many senior White House aides have become infuriated with the E.P.A. chief and exasperated with his ethical lapses, believing that it is only a matter of time before his special standing with the president wears thin.

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But Mr. Trump’s decision to keep Mr. Pruitt in his job over the counsel of his chief of staff also raised new questions about Mr. Kelly’s power in the West Wing. It was only two months ago that Mr. Trump was musing privately about replacing Mr. Kelly in the aftermath of the scandal surrounding Rob Porter, Mr. Trump’s staff secretary who resigned under pressure after it emerged that he had faced allegations of spousal abuse by two former wives.

In recent days, Mr. Trump has appeared determined to do things his own way, and he has conducted a purge of people in his administration who had clashed with him, including Rex W. Tillerson, the secretary of state, and Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, the national security adviser whose last day at the White House was Friday.

But Mr. Trump regards Mr. Pruitt warmly, and — for now — has continued to back him.

“I think he’s done a fantastic job at E.P.A.,” Mr. Trump told reporters on Thursday on Air Force One as he returned to Washington from an event in West Virginia. “I think he’ll be fine.”

On Friday, Mr. Trump pushed back against news reports that he had considered replacing Jeff Sessions, the attorney general, with Mr. Pruitt, saying in a tweet that his E.P.A. chief “is doing a great job but is TOTALLY under siege.”

Do you believe that the Fake News Media is pushing hard on a story that I am going to replace A.G. Jeff Sessions with EPA Chief Scott Pruitt, who is doing a great job but is TOTALLY under siege? Do people really believe this stuff? So much of the media is dishonest and corrupt!

—
Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump)
April 6, 2018

That came hours before yet another embarrassing revelation on Friday afternoon, when Politico reported that the lobbyists who owned the condominium Mr. Pruitt paid $50 a night to rent had leased the space to him for only six weeks, and became frustrated when he declined for months to leave, eventually pushing him out and changing the locks.

The president, who dislikes direct personal confrontations, has been known to change his mind and tone rapidly when it comes to personnel decisions as events unfold and he gauges the reaction in the news media and the potential for damage to his own reputation. But his aides also point out that Mr. Trump relishes doing things his own way and bristles against being told he must adhere to certain conventions, even when failing to do so may mean enduring political fallout.

In interviews in recent days with conservative news outlets, including Fox News and The Washington Examiner, Mr. Pruitt pushed back hard against accusations that his actions were unethical. In an interview with Fox News, he described his living arrangement as an “Airbnb situation,” and said the E.P.A.’s ethics office had signed off on it.

The ethics office ruled that Mr. Pruitt’s condo rental did not violate the agency’s rules. A later memo released this week said the office did not have all the facts about the rental when it made its initial ruling, including reports that Mr. Pruitt’s daughter, McKenna Pruitt, lived at the apartment when she was a White House intern.

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Asked by Fox whether renting a room from a Washington lobbyist violated Mr. Trump’s credo of draining the swamp, Mr. Pruitt replied, “I don’t even think that’s even remotely fair to ask that question.”

Mr. Trump, an avid Fox viewer who puts great stock in TV performances, did not appear to think much of Mr. Pruitt’s appearance. Asked Thursday on Air Force One what he thought about it, he paused, smiled wryly and said, “It’s an interesting interview.”

On Friday, a coalition of 64 House Democrats called for Mr. Pruitt’s resignation. Mr. Pruitt’s conservative allies said that is more likely to bolster the administrator’s standing than hurt it and said they hope Mr. Kelly will not force him out.

“If he doesn’t weather this, no one is ever going to take another job in this administration, and John Kelly is an idiot,” said Michael McKenna, a Republican energy lobbyist, adding, “If this turns into a referendum on who is doing more for the president’s agenda, Pruitt will win.”

Conservatives have rallied around Mr. Pruitt. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page said the E.P.A. chief was being hounded because of his success in dismantling Obama-era environmental standards. Other conservative groups have accused the news media of campaigning for Mr. Pruitt’s ouster.

Mr. Kelly and Mr. Pruitt have clashed in the past. The chief of staff stepped in last year to block an effort by the E.P.A. chief to announce public “red team, blue team” hearings on climate change, an idea that Mr. Pruitt had personally pitched to the president as a way of challenging the science behind global warming. Mr. Trump liked the idea, officials said, but his administration regarded it as foolish at best and potentially disastrous, fearing it could become a spectacle that would undermine the president’s antiregulatory push.

At a December meeting to discuss Mr. Pruitt’s plan, a deputy of Mr. Kelly’s said the plan was “dead” and not to be discussed further.

Correction: April 6, 2018

An earlier version of this article misstated in one instance the amount of money Scott Pruitt paid to rent a condominium co-owned by the wife of an energy lobbyist. It was $50 a night, not $50 a month.

Correction: April 6, 2018

An earlier version of this article misstated the day on which 64 House Democrats called for Scott Pruitt’s resignation. It was Friday, not Thursday.

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Nasim Aghdam, the YouTube Shooting, and the Anxiety of Demonetization

In the now all-too-familiar search for a motive that follows mass shootings in America, few recent cases have provided as seemingly clear a narrative as that of Nasim Aghdam, the woman who sneaked into the headquarters of YouTube, in San Bruno, California, on Tuesday and opened fire with a handgun, wounding three employees before killing herself. Aghdam was a YouTube content creator by trade; she starred in her own kookily amateurish music videos, sketches, fitness how-tos, and rants, many promoting veganism and all filmed in the same eerie, oversaturated hue. But she held a grudge against the company, which she believed had jeopardized her work by unfairly censoring her videos and subjecting them to “demonitization”—making them ineligible for advertising revenue. In a video posted last year, Aghdam explained to her followers that the reason YouTube was “discriminating and censoring us” was that “people like me are not good for big business.” Writing on her personal Web site, she concluded, “There is no equal growth opportunity on YOUTUBE or any other video sharing site, your channel will grow if they want [it] to!!!!!” According to Aghdam’s brother Shahran, “She was always complaining that YouTube ruined her life.” Prior to the attack, he and his father had warned police that she might target the company.

Aghdam’s unhinged prose and wide-eyed glare can convey the sense that she made YouTube into an all-powerful enemy from scratch, like the schizophrenic who believes that the C.I.A. is after him. In fact, a certain amount of paranoia and resentment defines many creators’ relationship with the platform that pays them. This stems mainly from YouTube’s moderation techniques, which are opaque and ever-shifting, guided by algorithms that, at least in the popular imagination of YouTube users, can reduce someone’s income to nothing on a mathematical whim.

In January, YouTube raised the threshold for monetization to a thousand subscribers and four thousand “watch hours” per month; any channel with numbers below that would no longer be eligible to receive ad revenue. The change was the latest in a series of attempts by YouTube to improve the friendliness of the platform to advertisers by cutting down on malicious content. Last March, an investigation in the Times of London revealed that YouTube’s automated ad-placing system had gone awry; in one case, a promotional video by L’Oréal appeared after a sermon by the Baptist preacher Steven Anderson, whose church the Southern Poverty Law Center classifies as a hate group. Major advertisers boycotted.

The Adpocalypse, as the crisis came to be known, cost YouTubers dearly in advertising revenue and reputation. The company went all out to try to salvage its image, demonetizing videos left and right. But the zeal to clean up the platform often put it at odds with the community. For years, full-time YouTubers had revelled in the rawness and immediacy of their medium; now they found seemingly innocuous videos struck for no reason. In September, the YouTube celebrity Hank Green tweeted a notice that he had received on his channel informing him that two of his videos—one called “Vegetables that look like Penises,” the other a dispatch from the Zaatari refugee camp, in Jordan—had been demonetized. “YouTube swiftly reinstated monetization on the Zataari video when we called them on it,” Green wrote. “But this whole situation is very very worrying.”

In the wake of Tuesday’s shooting, the question of what role demonetization may have played swiftly became a topic of speculation among YouTubers. Some expressed a kind of sympathy for Aghdam, condemning the attack even as they recalled their own experiences in the depths of the Adpocalypse. “I get it—oh, I get it,” Matt Jarbo, who goes by the handle Mundane Matt, said on his live-streamed show. (A clip from the broadcast has already been viewed more than seventy-four thousand times.) “The frustration is there,” he went on. “There were many, many, many nights where I would just lay at night completely flabbergasted, frustrated, and angry, because YouTube wasn’t communicating.” Jarbo first attracted an audience during the Gamergate controversy, in 2014. His position back then resembled that of many right-leaning commentators on Twitter this week, who saw the shooting as a tragic result of overbearing censorship. (As Andrew Torba, the C.E.O. of the “free speech social network” Gab, wrote in a post on Wednesday, “Censorship kills.”) Far more common, though, were the unequivocal condemnations of Aghdam and expressions of support for the company from high-profile YouTubers. Green tweeted, “This has nothing to do with YouTube policy. It’s a sad and horrific story of a person who built anger and hate inside of herself until it seemed like a good idea to get a gun and use it.”

Looking at Aghdam’s videos, you get the impression that only a delusional person might have expected them to attract more than the tiny audience that seemed to give her such pain. And yet she was something of a celebrity in her native Iran, where she was known by the name Green Nasim. In one of her most popular videos, according to the Times, Aghdam “wears a revealing purple dress, showing cleavage, and begins to slowly strip off her clothes to reveal a pair of fake plastic breasts.” All told, her YouTube videos racked up nearly nine million views and thirty thousand subscribers. In the online attention economy, fame often has nothing to do with talent and, in fact, can be spurred by its conspicuous absence. One could imagine how sudden success could be even more disorienting than failure for someone like Aghdam.

Reading the story of Aghdam’s unlikely fame and horrifying end, I was reminded of Edgar Welch, the twenty-eight-year-old man who, in late 2016, drove from North Carolina to Washington, D.C., and fired an assault rifle in the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria. Welch had been inspired to act by the conspiracy theory known as Pizzagate, which propagated false rumors of a child sex ring operating out of the pizzeria, overseen by Democratic Party officials—rumors that circulated, in part, on YouTube. The spectacle of Welch’s attack and arrest fuelled further concerns over fake news and malicious content, which had already gripped commentators in the latter days of the Presidential election. This set the stage, in turn, for the intense reaction by advertisers to the Times of London report, which then spurred the crackdown that, it seems, Aghdam fixated on before she committed her crime. If Welch symbolized the dangers of an unfettered Internet, then Aghdam reminds us that the quest to control it is scarcely less fraught.

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