The fired Veterans Affairs secretary claims he was politically knifed: ‘It should not be this hard to serve your country.’
Ousted Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin is going down swinging.
Instead of disappearing into obscurity like others who were summarily fired by President Donald Trump, Shulkin is using his dismissal as an opportunity to step into the spotlight. Freed from the constraints of serving in the Trump administration, Shulkin is publicly — and loudly — raising red flags about what he sees as a sinister plot to privatize veterans’ health care.
Within hours of Trump’s announcement via Twitter that he is replacing Shulkin with White House physician Ronny Jackson, the newly unseated secretary had published an op-ed in The New York Times and conducted an interview with NPR.
Shulkin is flipping the script on an unspoken rule in Washington that fired Cabinet secretaries and other senior administration officials should keep their grievances to themselves out of respect for the president. But Trump’s unconventional presidency, which has spit out a string of jilted ex-staffers, is challenging that long-standing practice.
Former Trump administration officials are quick to anonymously lambaste the president and his team to reporters. And a small number have started doing it on the record.
Former chief strategist Steve Bannon infuriated Trump after his critical on-the-record comments in Michael Wolff’s recent book came to light. Former White House aide Omarosa Manigault Newman went on the reality show “Big Brother“ after getting fired, where she repeatedly turned on her colleagues in the White House.
In contrast, former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who was also fired via Twitter, has said little so far about his own disagreements with Trump, only hinting at his frustrations in farewell remarks to State Department staff in which he called Washington a “mean-spirited town.”
Shulkin, for his part, blamed his ouster on “the ambitions of people who want to put VA health care in the hands of the private sector,” something he opposes, lamenting that a political power struggle over his department made it tougher to do the work of running and improving the VA.
“They saw me as an obstacle to privatization who had to be removed,” Shulkin wrote in his New York Times op-ed, published shortly after midnight on Thursday. “As I prepare to leave government, I am struck by a recurring thought: It should not be this hard to serve your country.”
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No longer muzzled, Shulkin takes on Trump’s White House https://t.co/Vg2nrXQapM pic.twitter.com/PwnD1YG1Ix
— POLITICO (@politico) March 29, 2018
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