According to a new report from The Washington Post, back in September, Millan Hupp, Pruitt’s director of scheduling and advance, called the Trump International Hotel in Washington to ask how much it would cost to buy one of its used mattresses. Specifically, Hupp, at Pruitt’s request, was on the hunt for a discount on a “Trump Home Luxury Plush Euro Pillow Top” mattress. While hotel staffers do occasionally help guests purchase Trump-branded furnishings, used mattresses, per the Post, “do not appear to be available.” Rather, Hupp told aides on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Pruitt had “spoken with someone at the Trump hotel who had indicated there could be a mattress he could purchase, an old mattress he could purchase,” and that the administrator “had expressed interest in securing a mattress” to her.
This obviously raises a lot of questions, the least of which is whether or not the E.P.A. chief broke federal ethics rules that prohibit government employees from basically using subordinates as personal assistants. But the most pressing, of course, is why Pruitt was so dedicated to procuring a used mattress when he could have gotten a brand-new one for around the same price. While the Post says Pruitt has apparently attempted to “minimize his personal expenses since moving to Washington,” a standard queen version of the item he was after, without a box spring, costs $1,399 before tax and shipping, while a king retails at $1,750. Even if Pruitt got a 50-percent discount, the used mattress would have cost more than, say, a brand-new Serta Perfect Sleeper Seabright Eurotop Mattress, with money left over to splurge on the highly rated pillow topper. Which leaves us no other choice but to conclude that Pruitt is a weirdo who actively seeks out mattresses slept on by strangers. Like, he shows up to Sealys showrooms, cuts off the salesperson’s spiel—“this model is very popular and I think we’ve got a few left in stock“—and says, “That’s great but do you have anything someone’s recently died on?” (Another possibility is that he‘s so devoted to kissing Trump’s ass that his bedding hunt stemmed from a six-year-old tweet in which the real-estate developer claimed his branded mattresses were “phenomenal.”)
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