American cesspool
Green algae, blue shards, and a red-faced megalomaniac.
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The color palette transition is perfect: green algae turned blue paint into a red-faced president. Welcome to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool saga, a perfect metaphor for Donald Trump’s laughable-were-it-not-catastrophic second presidential term.
In the pantheon of Trumpian sight gags, the reflecting pool fiasco is at best a pratfall. And, boy oh boy, are Americans having gallons of fun at Trump’s expense, creating everything from green algae-colored craft cocktails to Creature from the Green Lagoon swamp memes.
What’s serious about this otherwise comical episode is how it reveals so many of Trump’s myriad flaws: His tendency to overpromise but underdeliver; his flaunting of scientific expertise in favor of gut decision making; his penchant for ignoring contracting protocols in favor of transparent graft; his corrosive, showy patriotism designed to glorify himself and “own” the libs; his wanton destruction of cherished federal symbols; and, of course, after the project quickly went south, his inevitable blame-shifting onto anyone — Barack Obama, especially — but himself.
The pool on the National Mall may not reflect blue as Donald Trump fervently hoped. But the renovation fiasco perfectly reflects the ignorant, bloviated patriotism of Trump 2.0.
Bungled boondoggling
Let’s start with the incompetence, graft, and crony capitalism, the holy trinity of Trump’s pre-presidential business model and current governing practices.
Trump is a bad businessman and dealmaker, but a worse public official. He knows little and cares even less about policy. He loves to make huge promises (“we’re signing a healthcare plan within two weeks”) and never follow through. And far too many of his decisions are guided by self-interest, immodesty, and his inveterate belief that his own genius transcends science and logic.
Little surprise, then, that Trump was confident that draining and painting the bottom of the reflecting pool “American flag blue” would magically make the water appear blue. He boasted that the new coating was thick, strong, flexible. Trump’s uncle taught at MIT, so clearly he understands science by dint of his superior genetics. Trump quickly took credit for the new pool, boasting on June 6 that the renovations were complete.
But as he failed to learn during the covid pandemic — one day the virus would just “go away” the Epidemiologist in Chief declared at least 40 times — biology and chemistry do not bend to his petty, misinformed whims. Algae blooms, accelerated by a hot Washington summer and the heat-absorbing blue polymer he installed, revolted. The water quickly turned green; crews scrambled to pump slimy water from the pool into the Washington sewer system.
Pouring hydrogen peroxide into the pool to kill the algae — another brilliant idea — only shredded the blue polymer on the reflecting pool’s bottom, turning the renovation into a catastrophe.
Within two weeks of Trump’s June 6 victory-lapping, almost all of the blue paint had peeled off the pool bottom.
Trump’s overconfidence and incompetence were magnified by another Trumpian signature: his rampant, naked cronyism.
Trump forced the Department of Interior to give a $14.7 million, no-bid contract to Virginia-based Atlantic Industrial Coatings, which has worked on pools at Trump’s properties, to apply the blue sealant. Because Trump repeatedly stated that he personally chose AIC for the job, to blame the contractor would be to blame himself.
Meanwhile, another $1.7 million slice of the contract to install a “nano-bubble” purification filtering system was awarded to — you can’t make this up — an Ohio-based company called Green Water Solutions. The firm is owned by John J. Cafaro, a West Palm Beach Trump neighbor who looks like one of the mid-‘70s Philadelphia capos who strong-armed Rocky into making his weekly collections.
Cafaro was convicted of violating Ohio campaign finance law and once tried unsuccessfully to bribe former Rep. James Traficante. And here comes the entirely predictable twist: Cafaro donated a quarter-million dollars in 2020 to the Trump Victory committee.
“The pool is the latest in a string of cases where Mr. Trump’s government invoked special powers to shut down required competition, and then handed contracts directly to the president’s preferred vendors,” New York Times White House reporters David A. Fahrenthold and Luke Broadwater wrote a month ago.
Compensatory patriotism
The reflecting pool disaster also marries two of Trump’s other grating tendencies: his insatiable need for what the kids today might call “legacy-maxxing,” and his transparent attempts to exploit the most superficial forms of patriotism.
The pool is the latest but surely not the last of Trump’s vanity projects. As we previously chronicled here at Public Notice, that list includes plastering his name, face, or signature on National Park passes, American currency, and US passports.
Draining and painting the pool basin “American flag blue” is merely his latest gimmick to project his patriotism despite having never served in uniform. Like Trump’s other diversions, the pool project was designed to glorify himself and deflect Americans’ attention away from his failed tariff policies and the memorandum-of-surrender he signed to end the Iran war. (The MOU collapsed faster than the re-emergence of the reflecting pool’s green algae.)
Trump also sold the pool renovation project as a testament to his unique ingenuity and problem-solving ability relative to the failures of his predecessors, especially Obama, with whom the thin-skinned president remains completely obsessed.
“Unlike under Obama and [Joe] Biden, the National Park Service is actually maintaining the beautifully completed Reflecting Pool,” a Department of Interior spokesperson said, parroting the president’s premature victory-lapping and critiques of his Democratic predecessors. Oops.
Blame-shifting
Trump’s obsession with the reflecting pool project perhaps ranks behind only his White House ballroom fixation. In the four weeks between May 26 and June 21 Trump posted on his Truth Social platform at least 29 times, either touting the reflecting pool project or later, once the water turned green and the paint peeled, to blame others for his own bungling.
Trump wanted all the credit for himself, of course. So when the renovation failed, he predictably began to lie and blame-shift, claiming imaginary vandals sabotaged the project.
“[Vandals] destroyed the grass outside of the Pool, they’ve also done everything possible to hurt the inside surface that was just installed,” he falsely claimed in one post. “No different than the chemicals that were used on the National Mall, they used something similar in the Reflecting Pool to try to destroy and demean our beautiful work.”
Yes, a few people tore off portions of blue paint as souvenirs. But that was after the paint had already peeled away into fan-like shards. They didn’t rip up or vandalize the pool; some combination of the algae and hydrogen peroxide did that.
In his rush to blame anyone but himself, Trump invented a very specific fabrication that directly contradicts an earlier lie: He claimed a curiously unidentified vandal used a knife to cut a 250-foot “gash” in the pool liner. Apparently Trump forgot that he had boasted only a few weeks earlier that the polymer was so strong that “if you had a knife you can’t even cut it — so strong, so powerful.”
The Washington Post investigated Trump’s claim about the 250-foot gash but “could not immediately verify Trump’s allegations, and reporters at the pool Sunday could not spot a gash fitting that description. At least eight officers patrolling the site, when asked about Trump’s allegation, could not point it out.”
Nonetheless, Trump later doubled down on the bogus “gash” claim, even increasing the size of it from 250 feet to 350 feet. And fencing was evening installed around the reflecting pool to protect it from imaginary vandals.
None of the transparently desperate lies prevented Trump’s most die-hard media lackeys — including CNN’s Scott Jennings — from repeating these excuses. But amplifying Trump’s BS only created a “Streisand effect” that generated further coverage of this most embarrassing episode.
The pool that reflects incompetence
Designed to reflect the image of the Washington Monument westward toward the Lincoln Memorial, and vice versa — a viewpoint partially obfuscated by the 2004 completion of the World War II monument in between — the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool is perhaps most famously memorialized as the foreground to Martin Luther King’s famed 1963 “I Have a Dream Speech.” (And, of course, the fictional mid-pond reunion of Forrest Gump and his childhood friend Jenny, which social media satirists have also parodied.)
Trump has now torn down the East Wing of the White House, desecrated passports and park passes by affixing his face to them, and spoiled the Reflecting Pool. All of these acts, he claims, are in service to beautification of the nation’s capital in advance of next week’s 250th celebration of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. But in fact they were done to satisfy his own massive ego.
In fairness to Trump and the National Park Service, since it opened in 1922 the reflecting pool has been plagued by a century’s-worth of leaks, algae blooms, and assorted problems. It was hardly Trump’s worst idea to repair and clean it in time for the 250th anniversary celebrations. Had Trump simply ordered the National Park Service a year ago to produce a report on how best to fix the pool’s longstanding problems, initiated an open bidding process for firms to compete for the contracts to fix it, and refrained from victory-lapping, the ensuing controversy could have been mostly if not entirely avoided.
But Donald “I alone can fix it” Trump could not help himself. He promised the renovated pool would be amazing, an achievement all those loser presidents who served before him — especially the black one — could neither conceive nor execute. He, of course, deserved all the credit.
So Trump can whine and blame-shift until he’s blue — or green, or red — in the face. But if he demanded all the credit a few weeks ago, he deserves all the blame now.
That’s it for today
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What isn't funny is that in his frenzy to find a scapegoat he's had people arrested for just TOUCHING the water in the pool. Wags have remarked that the charges will stick about as well as the pool lining, but in the meantime innocent people will have to run up.big legal fees and of course relentless vilification by the obedient North Korean-style "journalists" on Fox. Death threats and hate-mail are a given.
One other totally petty and pedantic point, forgive me but I used to teach a writing course: Trump does not FLAUNT scientific expertise, because he has none to flaunt. He FLOUTS the expertise of others.
He’s Dennis the Menace, Problem Child, Wreck-it Ralph and Damien (of “The Omen”) all rolled up into ghastly huge package.🤦🏼♀️Billy Joel said it best: “Only the good die young”
Spot on, Tom!