Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt was asked the same question over and over and over again during a Friday briefing with reporters: Does President Trump still believe global warming is a hoax?
And each time, Pruitt refused to answer with a “yes” or a “no,” telling reporters that as he and the president discussed exiting the Paris climate deal, the topic of climate change never came up.
“All the discussions that we had through the last several weeks have been focused on one singular issue: Is Paris good or not for this country?” Pruitt said when asked the question a first time. “That’s the discussions I’ve had with the president. So, that’s been my focus.”
Pruitt gave that sort of answer again and again as he dodged similar questions, then he turned the stage over to White House press secretary Sean Spicer, who also repeatedly refused to answer the simple question.
“I have not had an opportunity to have that discussion,” said Spicer, who gave a similar answer to a similar question at a briefing earlier in the week. “I think that Administrator Pruitt pointed out that what the president is focused on is making sure that we have clean water, clean air and making sure that we have the best deal for the American workers.”
The question has yet to be answered by anyone in the administration, even as aides and others appear on television and hold briefings to explain Trump’s decision to leave the Paris agreement — despite protests from members of his own administration, environmental experts, corporate titans and fellow foreign leaders.
Trump has long been skeptical of climate change, despite vast scientific evidence showing that human activity has contributed to the problem, and has repeatedly suggested that it is a “hoax.” A Vox analysis found that Trump has tweeted such skepticism at least 115 times since 2011, describing global warming as “mythical,” “nonexistent,” “fictional,” an “expensive hoax” and “bulls–-.”
“The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive,” Trump wrote in a November 2012 tweet.
And whenever New York was hit with a cold spell or snowstorm, Trump would often tweet a joke about global warming. In October 2015, when Trump was the front-runner for the GOP nomination, he tweeted: “It’s really cold outside, they are calling it a major freeze, weeks ahead of normal. Man, we could use a big fat dose of global warming!”
It’s unclear if the president has changed his position on climate change, with many of his aides insisting this week that they do not know their boss’s position on a key issue that’s at the heart of a deal that the administration wants to exit.
Gary Cohn, Trump’s chief economic adviser, repeatedly dodged the question in a CNN interview on Thursday evening.
As Trump announced in the White House Rose Garden on Thursday afternoon that the United States would exit the Paris deal, he and members of his administration pitched the decision as an economic one and did not dwell on the environmental implications.
“We’re going to have the cleanest air. We’re going to have the cleanest water,” Trump said at one point. “We will be environmentally friendly but we’re not going to put our businesses out of work, we’re not going to lose our jobs.”