Standing outside Donald Trump’s criminal trial, Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) suggested he, like Trump, was the victim of unfair political persecution — pointing to the Justice Department’s inquiry into his hospital chain, which paid $1.7 billion to resolve Medicare fraud charges.
“I’m fed up,” Scott said Thursday. “I watched what happened to me and my company. I’ve talked to businesspeople over the years [about] what’s happened to them, when you have political persecution. And now what I’ve watched with [former] President Trump with all these cases. This is just simply — they don’t want this guy on the ballot.”
He added, “I’ve had experience with this. Back in the 90s, I was the lead opponent to Hillarycare,” referring to then-First Lady Hillary Clinton’s health care plan. “After it was defeated, she used the Justice Department to go after me and my company,” he claimed. “This can’t continue. What’s happening to this president is wrong.”
Scott made similarly combative comments defending Trump in an appearance on Fox & Friends earlier on Thursday. “I fought Hillarycare, and guess what happened when I fought Hillarycare? Justice came after me and attacked me and my company,” he said.
Scott, the former governor of Florida, was previously the CEO of Columbia/HCA — now known as HCA Healthcare, the nation’s largest hospital chain. He resigned from Columbia/HCA after the FBI began a probe that ultimately resulted in the company paying $1.7 billion in fines to settle charges of rampant Medicare fraud. The fines were a record at the time.
According to the Miami Herald, “federal investigators found that Scott took part in business practices at Columbia/HCA that were later found to be illegal — specifically, that Scott and other executives offered financial incentives to doctors in exchange for patient referrals, in violation of federal law, according to lawsuits the Justice Department filed against the company in 2001.”
Columbia/HCA pleaded guilty to 14 felonies — most of which were committed during Scott’s time leading the company, according to the paper.
The comments represent a major shift for Scott, who has long apologized for the company’s behavior.
During his 2010 campaign for governor, Scott said, “As I have said repeatedly, Columbia/HCA made mistakes, and I take responsibility for what happened on my watch as CEO.”
He even apologized in an FAQ section on his website: “I’ve made mistakes in my life. And mistakes were certainly made at Columbia/HCA,” he said on the website. “I was the CEO of the company and as CEO I accept responsibility for what happened on my watch. I learned very hard lessons from what happened and those lessons have helped me become a better businessman and leader. Lessons I will bring to the governorship with your support and vote.”
Alex Wood, a spokesperson for the Florida Democratic Party, tells Rolling Stone: “Rick Scott admitted to overseeing the largest Medicare fraud in history and wrote the plan to gut Medicare. Anytime he reminds voters of his attacks on the health care that nearly five million Floridians depend on, it’s a reminder why he shouldn’t be in the Senate.”
War Is Peace: Trump’s Regime-Change Reversal
As American and Israeli rockets fly into Tehran, with the stated goal of regime change, anyone who bought into the self-evidently absurd idea of “Donald the Dove” ending America’s forever wars ought to be suffering from a bloody form of buyer’s remorse.
It was always bullshit. But that’s what the Trump team was selling hard. Take human ghoul Stephen Miller’s tweet days before the election: “Kamala = WWIII. Trump = Peace.”
The Trump team reads George Orwell’s 1984 like an owner’s manual and so of course “war is peace.” Their undermining of NATO and the dismantling of American alliances in favor of a “might makes right” foreign policy executed by a sycophantic kakistocracy is a guarantee of more war amid autocratic power grabs worldwide, with a side order of corrupt crony capitalism to profit from the chaos.
If you voted for Trump and believed him, this is on you. And that includes self-styled Palestinian peace activists who thought that Biden and Harris were the worst of all possible worlds and stayed home. We will no doubt see protests for the innocent lives lost in these strikes — but I’d have a lot more time for those folks if they were also seen protesting the estimated 20,000 to 30,000 Iranian lives snuffed out by murderous mullahs in the last few months alone.
The Islamic Republic of Iran has been despotic and dangerous from its inception. The Iranian people have been oppressed and denied basic freedoms for decades. But this is an extreme example of a war of choice. The American military strikes against Iran’s nuclear weapons facility last year were justified because Iran cannot be trusted with a nuclear weapon. That is true. But the much trumpeted total obliteration of those facilities is apparently not true — or so goes the justification for this war. And don’t forget that it was Trump who pulled the U.S. out of an Obama-era deal to stop Iran from developing weapons — arguing absurdly that the imperfect anti-nuke deal needed to be blown up to stop Iran from developing a bomb. Iran’s subsequent progress toward a bomb then created the rationale toward these strikes. This is a self-inflicted state of emergency. Peace is war and war is peace.
Pity the willful dupes in Congress who deluded themselves into thinking that Trump deserved the Nobel Peace Prize. They’ll probably rationalize that he would’ve been peaceful if he got the honor. Now it will be read as a cautionary tale for not sucking up. The chairman of the Board of Peace is now bored of peace. While Rand Paul remains admirably consistent, it’s Lindsey Graham who is pirouetting around the Senate floor while the Gimp Speaker Mike Johnson is unable to speak for the basic constitutional principles of separation of powers let alone authorization to go to war.
If you’re feeling shell-shocked trying to keep up with Operation Epstein Distraction, get ready for the inevitable next crisis — regime change without a plan for replacement. This is what the Trump administration did in Venezuela — kidnapping the socialist dictator Maduro but keeping his regime in place in exchange for crude oil access. The opposition is still in exile and its leader María Corina Machado gave her Nobel Peace Prize to Trump in exchange for exactly nothing.
One of the clear lessons of history is that if you don’t win the peace, you don’t win the war. The Saudis and their Sunni allies will back the U.S. and Iran because they hate the Shia Iranians (who, incidentally, are not Arabs), but beyond removing the Iranian regime, the plans for replacement and stabilization seem TBD — and with Trump’s inability to stay focused on anything beyond his immediate self-interest, solid plans are unlikely to emerge. Maybe a leader will come from the underground opposition; maybe it will be the Shah’s son, who has been living in the U.S. waiting for a restoration like many members of the diaspora. The upside is that Iran has a distinguished history and an accomplished Persian culture: The Islamists don’t represent the entirety of the people of Iran and never have.
But the path ahead will be messy at best. It will require concerted effort and civil commitment, not just an open call for private investment from Mar-a-Lago members. If the United States is now kidnapping and killing dictators without direct provocation, it establishes a dangerous precedent which will come back to bite us after demolishing our moral authority in the world.
It is the unexpected effects, the cascades of consequence where we cannot always plan ahead, that cause most responsible statesmen to try to keep the peace. But Trump has the carelessness of a rich-boy bully who can always buy or bluster his way out of trouble. He’s a con man who has found his ultimate mark in his followers, who fool themselves into thinking that a reflexive liar is the one man with the courage to tell the truth.
Perhaps the most prominent example is the vice president himself — a bright guy who not that long ago compared Trump to Hitler and a deadly narcotic but then convinced himself that careerism demanded an abrupt conversion. After all, he endorsed Trump less than two years ago with this very serious column headlined “Trump’s Best Foreign Policy? Not Starting Any Wars,” explaining, “He has my support in 2024 because I know he won’t recklessly send Americans to fight overseas.”