Trump Starts Arresting People Because His Reflecting Pool Makeover Is Just Algae And Peeling Paint

from the green-is-color-of-MAGA-tears dept

Yeah, that’s a shame. It couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy bigger asshole. It’s as if Trump asked his underlings to generate the perfect metaphor for his second administration and they fucking nailed it.

Trump has tried to impose his self-gratification on an event even he can’t possibly hope to destroy: the 250th anniversary of this country’s independence. His race against the clock has resulted in a lot of federal contractors racing around DC to apply gold Sharpies to any monument that doesn’t look sufficiently garish.

Trump also decided he could do what many other presidents couldn’t: revamp the DC reflecting pool without being subjected to discolored water and/or logistic missteps. Trump made sure he couldn’t achieve the latter by ordering his motorcade to drive onto the unfinished reflecting pool, delaying its completion. And he couldn’t beat nature in terms of the former, especially after demanding the floor of the pool be painted with a very algae-friendly shade of “American flag blue.”

The pumps kicked in and hours later, the reflecting pool resembled any Chicago waterway on St. Patrick’s Day. Department of Interior personnel were brought in to run vacuums, scatter hydrogen peroxide, and assure visitors and locals that the ectoplasm-esque fluid being routed to the nearest storm drains was perfectly safe and not likely to spawn thousands of murderous C.H.U.D.S. (also in the non-literal sense) that will terrorize the DC area for decades to come.

It is the metaphor Trump never wanted but one he absolutely earned. He promised that some of his pool guy buddies were capable of humiliating previous presidential attempts to “modernize” this DC fixture, thus elevating him to Supreme God King Of The Wading Pool. Instead, he got exactly what he should have expected, if he were anyone else but Donald Goddamn Trump. And it’s not a problem inherent to Donald Trump. It’s something that plagues the entirety of his most loyal supporters. I’ll turn this over to David Roth of Defector, a site you should absolutely be reading and subscribing to:

If everyone in the United States weren’t living downstream from its consequences, it would be a pretty good tragic flaw that Donald Trump wants more than anything to be seen as a brilliant man who has always been right about everything when he is transparently a butterfingered dunce whose professional expertise more or less begins and ends at making cutting remarks from a safe distance and directing other people to file nuisance lawsuits on his behalf. If assessed from a sufficient remove, the spread between the opening proposition—the man who knows more about every subject than any expert without even having to study or even pay attention to any of it, because he is just that much of a natural talent—and the relentlessly oafish output is a great bit, if admittedly also a bit one-note.

Lots of awful people are like this, and a great percentage of the degenerate gentry that is Trump’s truest and most durable base is extremely like this: Dumb old bullies all grandiose and soft from golf and infidelity; illiterate real-estate types with detailed opinions on The Differences Between The Races; the luridly unemployable adult children of car-dealership guys; anhedonic beneficiaries of a good investment or two who have, through sheer restless indolence and various dull biases, backed into some truly berserk and totally bespoke authoritarian worldviews. Aging phone addicts who think the country “needs a pharaoh.” Ruddy tax evaders who fear cities and are insecure about their boats. None of these people really do things especially well, and all of them are visibly getting worse, but they are all far enough from experiencing any kind of consequences that they can’t really imagine failing at anything they try.

When these are the people this debacle is happening to, no regular person feels even the least bit of sympathy for someone who thought they could buy and bully their way past nature.

But they can try to bully their way through this news cycle. While there were plenty of accounts detailing curious visitors to the pool picking out pieces of floating paint likely loosened by the DOI’s aggressive attempts to pry the landmark free of the algae’s grasp, no one but the Trump administration — including his DC District Attorney — has suggested LOLing about the peeling blue paint is a federal crime.

Now, we have this bullshit going on because Trump desperately needs to blame anyone but himself for the pool that’s going to need to be drained, repainted, resealed, and refilled yet again, with July 4th less than two weeks away.

“Five individuals have been arrested for vandalism. Five additional individuals were issued federal citations,” a department spokesperson told The Hill. 

The spokesperson said a total of 14 police reports have been filed for vandalism, including the alleged crimes described in President Trump’s recent Truth Social posts.

Question 1: Five? And what for exactly?

Question 2: Fourteen? And who filed these reports?

Question 3: Get the fuck out of here with this.

If you want more details on these allegations, you have to go to the source. And while you won’t get any details or anything approaching evidence, you will get the thrill of Trump attempting to Pizzagate his own pet project’s abject failure:

In an entirely predictable development, when Donald Trump was just pressed by reporters to explain the flawed renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, he denied that the contractors he awarded the work to were to blame and instead insisted that “vandals” had used a knife or box-cutter to cut a 350ft “slit” in the newly applied sealant, which started peeling away from the floor and floating to the surface within days of its application.

“I can’t help it if somebody goes in with a knife and starts hacking it up,” the president said.

In all fairness to this tyrant-on-training-wheels, it would be impossible for Trump to prevent “vandals” from creating a 350-foot “slit” in the pool. First of all, some vandals would have needed to have attempted this. Second of all, someone running the place might occasionally need to glance up from their Truth Social feed to keep an eye on the pool.

Considering the remake/remodel debacle has been the subject of intense 24/7 coverage since the refill effort began, you would think someone would have seen (and reported on) 350-foot slitting efforts by vandals. And yet, the only reports to surface so far deal with the algae infestation, the peeling paint, the people amused/bemused by all of this, and the government’s unproven assertions that the pool was vandalized.

Beyond Trump being hoisted by his own petard, there’s some joy to be had in seeing him struggle to blame others for him being so wrong about everything and then having to suffer through the aftermath of his abject failure. The downside is that this government is seeking to punish people because the president embarrassed himself. That’s fucked up. And that’s the lesson that needs to be internalized here. Even if you’ve done nothing wrong, this administration will bring its powers to bear against you because it’s always someone else’s fault when it fucks up.

Filed Under: asshats, dc, department of interior, donald trump, failure, jeanine pirro, loser, reflecting pool, trump administration