Trump Stories: Scott Pruitt

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Society & Culture, Documentary, News, News Commentary

4.7 • 12.1K Ratings

🗓️ 26 April 2018

⏱️ 59 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

As Donald Trump's EPA Administrator, Scott Pruitt is popular with conservatives for his aggressive rollback of Obama-era environmental regulations. He has also been strongly criticized for alleged ethics violations. But there's another side of Pruitt that's less well known. Pruitt is a Southern Baptist, and for years, his politics focused on faith-based issues like abortion and religious freedom. Pruitt has publicly said he doubts the science behind the theory of evolution. In this episode, we examine how Pruitt's faith informs his views on the environment, and how he handled a major pollution case in Oklahoma. Follow us on Twitter @NPREmbedded and @kellymcevers, and follow the reporters for this episode: @TomDreisbach and @JoeWertz. (Supreme Court audio in this episode comes from Oyez.)

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, I'm Kelly McEvers.
0:01.2	And I'm Tom Drizepok.
0:02.5	And this is embedded.
0:04.8	In 1997, Scott Pruitt took a trip with his church.
0:08.3	To a Romanian city, Tima Shwarah.
0:10.3	My first trip abroad.
0:11.2	And as I traveled to Tima Shwarah,
0:13.1	I got a chance to do something
0:14.8	in turn to church there.
0:16.4	It's a former communist country,
0:18.0	and so he's asking a bunch of questions.
0:20.2	I looked up on the wall of the church,
0:22.0	and there were pictures of pastors
0:23.2	that were serving that church
0:25.0	from the 1950s and the 1960s,
0:27.1	and I was very confused.
0:28.4	And so he's wondering, basically,
0:29.6	how can you be having church services
0:32.3	under communism, which was explicitly anti-religient?
0:37.2	And I asked the pastor,
0:38.8	with whom I was walking through the church,
0:41.0	did you all meet for church on Sundays
	...

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