Trump vs. algae is the feud we deserve
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Trump is an incompetent, ignorant, lying blowhard. He is also vain, resentful, and filled with hate. Put those characteristics together and you end up with a guy who is constantly humiliating himself and is in a constant rage spiral because people notice that he is humiliating himself. And when he is in a rage spiral, he looks for other people to blame.
Or to put it another way, the story of Trump’s presidency is the story of the most powerful man on earth bellowing and whining and spewing gouts of punitive bile because of unbelievably petty shit. From the moment when he forced his underlings to lie about the size of the crowds at his first inauguration to his crass posts celebrating the death of former special counsel Robert Mueller, there is no slight that Trump can’t turn into a forever grievance and no failure he can’t try to pin on someone else.
It’s like Caligula trying to make his horse a consul, except the horse is Trump’s own wounded ego, and it claims not just one seat, but absolutely all of them.
Trump hit a new pinnacle of absurd spite last week with not one but two preposterous misuses of government power and prestige. First, the Trump DOJ indicted an Olympic athlete for noticing that Trump’s reflecting pool renovations were a bust. And second, the Trump administration deleted thousands of pages about energy conservation because they made right-wing critics of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani look like dopes.
Both of these sound like ridiculous jokes. And they are ridiculous jokes. The problem is that these ridiculous jokes are now our country. We are living under the personalist dictatorship of a hateful clown obsessed with the news cycle and owning the libs. And unfortunately, since he has the whole federal government at his back, his ridiculous tantrums can in fact ruin people’s lives, and worse.
Trump vs. algae
As has been widely reported for weeks, Trump has managed to turn the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool into an algae-filled blight.
The pool is huge and maintaining it is complicated; it has long had problems with algae. Trump’s plan to renovate it before the 250th anniversary celebrations was not in itself a ridiculous decision.
But, of course, Trump, being Trump, went about the renovations in the most corrupt manner possible. He gave a $1.7 million no-bid contract for water purification to a Republican donor who also has a property near Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort.
Another $14.7 million no-bid contract was handed over to a Virginia firm to put a waterproof blue coating on the bottom of the pool.
The result of bypassing the competitive bid process has been disastrous. The coating began peeling off in sheets — probably because of faulty installation, according to experts consulted by CNN. The pool also sprouted an unsightly algae bloom, perhaps in part because the darker paint on the bottom raised the pool’s temperature, but mostly because disturbing the pool for renovations often results in algae blooms.
The ugliness drew sweeping media attention and mockery, as you’d expect when you screw up a very visible national monument in a city filled with national reporters. Trump could have just taken the L and tried to clean it up, like a normal public servant.
But of course he didn’t. Instead, he launched a full-blown foam-flecked conspiracy theory, lying that vandals had hacked off the blue coating (“probably a box cutter or a knife of some kind,” he blustered). He also insisted, even more absurdly, that the algae growth was the result of “chemicals” being “illegally placed in the water.”
All of which would be pretty funny — except that Trump’s wild false claims have been used as an excuse to harass and target visitors to the mall.
The administration has put up fencing around the pool; they’ve ordered security sweeps. A park that was once a place where everyone could come and celebrate the country has been turned into another dreary fascist exercise in security theater.
Even worse, it’s not just theater. Three-time Olympic canoeist David Hearn stopped at the pool and touched part of the blue material that had become partially detached. He was quickly arrested. Last week he was indicted for allegedly damaging the pool, with the charges being announced by tipsy Fox News propagandist-turned-US Attorney Jeanine Pirro during a news conference that seemed like some sort of dystopian comedy sketch.
Suffice it to say that the charges are ridiculous. The problems with the pool are not caused by vandals, and David Hearn, olympian, was not suddenly seized with a desire to damage national monuments.
Trump is terrorizing passersby in an effort to prevent people from looking at and reporting on the state of the pool. He’s also seeking scapegoats to blame for his own failure and corruption. As usual, he is turning his incompetence and embarrassment into everybody’s problem.
Trump vs. weather
More incompetence embarrassment was on the way.
Last week was, as you may remember, very hot on the East Coast. Mayor Mamdani tweeted an innocuous message to New Yorkers asking them to save energy and protect the power grid for everyone by turning their air conditioners to 78 degrees.
Mamdani, however, is a Muslim, a Democrat, and a socialist, and so the right went absolutely apeshit, ranting as if his request was the equivalent of a Stalinist purge.
“78 degrees??? Welcome to communism people! Hope you enjoy!” hyperventilated Barstool’s reactionary leader Dave Portnoy. Fox News host and Trump bootlicker Brian Kilmeade echoed that sentiment, adding on air, “when it’s 78 degrees, that’s when you usually put the AC on, but not in Communist New York City!” And so forth.
There was only one problem. Mamdani was not in fact parroting instructions from Karl Marx. He was sharing the energy-saving advice found on the US Department of Energy website. Several commenters quickly pointed this out — making Portnoy and Kilmeade and much of the right look like ignorant and gormless rubes.
But it is the job of the Trump administration to regorm the gormless — or, more accurately, to remove additional gorm. In any case, in order to win a nonsense internet controversy, the bright bulbs in Washington rushed to delete 6,000 webpages linked to heating, cooling, and energy. As Jason Scott, an archivist at the Internet Archive, noted, “mention a document that makes people look silly, and they will wipe years of documents and paid-for research to save face.”
No face was actually saved, obviously. Instead, the Trump administration looks more preposterously petty and Nero-like than ever. Hours of government labor was spent to defend the honor of David Portnoy and Brian Kilmeade and to win a war within the right-wing bubble most of the electorate couldn’t possibly care less about.
More, in the middle of a brutal heat wave, the US launched an all-out war on public information about how to deal with brutal heat waves, amplifying disinformation and erasing government resources. This is not surprising, given Trump and HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s current assault on public health and vaccines. But it doesn’t have to be surprising to be grotesque and dangerous.
The pettiest king
Neither Trump’s war on algae nor his attack on energy conservation webpages is the worst thing, or even the 500th worst thing, that this administration has done. But they are both indicative of a government driven by small-bore grievance, narcissistic wounds, and an inability to distinguish between the preferences of Fox News grifters and the good of the country.
These puerile motivations can lead to serious harms for individuals like Hearn — or like Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was wrongly deported in March 2025, and who is still being harassed by the government for daring to make them look bad.
Those same motivations can also lead to massive policy and humanitarian disasters; our current apparently endless war in the Middle East seems motivated in large part by Trump’s hatred of Obama and effort to erase the former president’s nuclear deal with Iran.
The whole point of democracy is that leaders are public servants. They are employed by the public to work towards the public good. They are not absolute rulers whose whims are law. Trump violates the public trust in large ways all the time — through his monumental corruption and self-dealing just for a start. But his smaller acts of revenge and point-scoring arguably highlight his abuse of power even more clearly.
Trump believes the country, and all its people, and all its money, and all its law enforcement, exist to make sure he wins all his online arguments and never has to say he’s sorry. We are living under the dictatorship of the absolutely smallest man alive. That makes all of us smaller as well.
That’s it for today
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I keep thinking back to the 2024 presidential election and he “promised” he wouldn’t use the office of the presidency to come after his enemies. The fact that that was even a possibility should’ve been game over for him but here we are.
As you wrote: "Mamdani, however, is a Muslim, a Democrat, and a socialist..." This may seem nitpicking, but Mamdani is a democratic socialist, not simply a socialist. The two are not identical, although they do have similarities. The reason I point this out is that the terms "socialist" and "communist" are getting tossed around without any attempt to explain what they mean, or how they may or may not apply.