I've found some reporting on who is backing Scott Pruitt. Unsurprisingly, this is a crowd with deep ties to movement conservatism and the Koch brothers.
Quote:Conservative leaders are urging President Donald Trump to stand behind embattled EPA chief Scott Pruitt, organizing for the first time to present a unified front in defense of a Trump Cabinet official.
In a letter delivered to the White House on Friday, the group of prominent conservatives thanked Trump for sticking with Pruitt, one of their ideological brethren, and said, in essence, that Pruitt’s policy accomplishments made him worth the trouble.
...The letter was signed by the leaders of 10 influential conservative organizations, including former Attorney General Edwin Meese, William Walton of CNP Action, Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, Michael Needham of Heritage Action, Adam Brandon of FreedomWorks, Jenny Beth Martin of Tea Party Patriots Citizen Fund, Brent Bozell of the Media Research Center and David McIntosh, president of the Club for Growth.
Martin said it was the first time the group had come together to defend a Trump administration official
...“This is the conservative movement coming forward and saying this guy is rock star,” said another strategist involved in crafting the letter.
Politico
Let's start with Ed Meese. Most of you will recall
this piece of recent history...
Quote:Shortly after President Obama started his second term, a loose-knit coalition of conservative activists led by former Attorney General Edwin Meese III gathered in the capital to plot strategy. Their push to repeal Mr. Obama’s health care law was going nowhere, and they desperately needed a new plan.
Out of that session, held one morning in a location the members insist on keeping secret, came a little-noticed “blueprint to defunding Obamacare,” signed by Mr. Meese and leaders of more than three dozen conservative groups.
...The billionaire Koch brothers, Charles and David, have been deeply involved with financing the overall effort.
Meese has been getting financial support from the Koch crowd for a long time. The following refers to the time period approximately during his tenure in the Reagan administration...
Quote:The recipients of Scaife's largess, such as...Edwin Meese III
Dark Money, p 83 (Richard Mellon Scaife, the Bradleys, the Coors family, John Olin and the DeVos family were, along with the Kochs, the key funders over the last half century of the arch-conservatism that now dominates the GOP. And Meese is a regular participant at Koch shindigs)
I was not familiar with Bill Walton but I certainly am aware of CNP Action. Understanding the Council for National Policy
wikipedia entry here is critically important in understanding how the US got as fucked up as it now is. CNP is a rogue's gallery of the bad guys.
Tony Perkins we all know. He's been the key public political operative for the religious right for more than a decade now. The "religious right" and the "libertarian movement" that arose out of the John Birch/pro-Goldwater crowd began to coalesce in the Goldwater era (the RR then included extremist elements of Protestantism and Catholicism). Perkins is presently defending Trump regardless of any level of moral turpitude.
Heritage Action, FreedomWorks and the Tea Party Patriots are all key players funded and organized by (or in) the Koch network
Brent Bozell is another right wing extremist with a long family history in this crowd. His father was the ghost-writer for Goldwater's The Conscience of a Conservative.
So this tells us who is pushing Trump on Pruitt from the outside. And this is not insignificant because this circle of people, institutions and corporate interests will control much more than a billion dollars in donations to the RNC over the next five years. And because these people/institutions are absolutely necessary in getting Trump's base worked up and to the polls, Trump will understand that he MUST have their support.
Of course it is notable that Pruitt is the
only character in Trump-world these people have bothered to defend and support. That's because of who Pruitt is and because of the governmental function he is in charge of, the EPA. And there is no other function of government the Kochs and allies want to kill. Because...money.
