Doug Burgum, the Secretary of the Interior, is not simply a member of Donald Trump’s Red State, defined by resentment, prejudice, and Fox News.

Burgum has spent days backing President Trump’s claim that the peeling lining of the Reflecting Pool on the National Mall was the work of vandals.

But he must know that the Reflecting Pool was no more vandalized than the 2020 election was rigged. He rode in the motorcade with Trump that sped up the middle of the emptied Reflecting Pool that may well have caused some of the damage in question.

But he continues to parrot his boss’s false accusations, seeming to have lost all sense of his former self as he declares, “We won’t back down.” He thereby becomes a vandal of another kind, desecrating a basic principle of justice in the country whose 250th birthday we are supposed to be celebrating.

“He cannot follow his own instincts, because Trump won’t tolerate it,” a close observer who has known Burgum for years told the Daily Beast on the condition he would not be named.

The observer added, “He has a Faustian bargain with Trump, and it would not surprise me to see, with the passage of time, he will come to regret some of the things he’s done.”

But Faust bargained for supreme knowledge, power and pleasure. The Burgumian bargain can be expressed in scriptural terms as “What will it profit a man if he gains the chance to shamelessly suck up to Donald Trump and forfeits his soul?”

Burgum is a 70-year-old graduate of the Stanford School of Business who sold a software startup to Microsoft for $1.1 billion and served two terms as a moderate Republican governor of North Dakota.

Back when he was a widely respected governor and still seemed to have a soul to sell, Burgum kicked in $1 million of his own money towards the building of the President Theodore Roosevelt Library in the state’s rugged Badlands.

By the time he neared the end of his second term in 2024, Burgum had made himself the lead champion of the TR library project. He seemed singularly determined to honor the hard-charging president who assumed office in 1901 and led America from the Gilded Age of unbridled corporate greed and the plundering of our natural resources into the Progressive Era of monopoly busting and conservation of public........

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