The reflecting pool and the abyss

Look into the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool right now, and what is reflected back at you is Donald Trump’s America.

Within it, you see great damage, inflicted as a result of Trump’s incompetence and corruption. Meanwhile, on the sidelines, everyone argues about what happened, with a hardcore of Trump supporters - led by Trump himself - trying to blame anything or anyone but the real culprit. Trump tries to bend the country’s institutions to accept his false narrative, and then they buckle and break. And it’s all in the service of the pettiest and most irrelevant of things - in this case, a pool lining.

It’s a shame, because the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool is one of the coolest landmarks in Washington, D.C. When I briefly lived there, I used to jog to and from it every day. A lot of the nation’s landmarks are a little bit lame in person, but standing in the shadow of the statue of the Great Liberator and gazing down at the Washington Monument really is kind of cool. It’s also something that you would hope would remain untouched by partisanship - a simple symbol of national unity.

Enter Donald Trump!

I think there are a few weird things with Trump scandals that make them hard to follow. Firstly, they usually contain so many absurdities and unfold over such a long time that it can be hard to keep them straight in your head. A second problem is that there’s usually so many of them going on at the same time. Trump does dumb stuff at a higher rate than anyone can keep track of. I follow U.S. politics for a living but even I need to prioritize, and so there’s a certain category of really dumb stuff that I end up just sighing at and not really paying that much attention to.

So let’s just briefly go over the reflecting pool saga in all its idiotic glory. Earlier this year, everyone was in agreement that the reflecting pool needed repairs. It had cracks in its granite and was leaking. Preservationists said it would cost about $300m over three years to repair it properly. Trump, who regards himself as the Albert Einstein of construction projects, decided that he could do a better job. He would simply have the concrete scrubbed, stuff some grout in the leaks, and then have the whole thing sprayed with an industrial-grade swimming pool lining. Job done!

The contractor who had previously renovated the pool said that this wasn’t going to work and that they wouldn’t do it. So Trump then awarded contracts for the work to companies with whom he had personal connections. Atlantic Industrial Coatings, which had done work for Trump before, got the contract to do most of the work. Greenwater Services, which is owned by one of Trump’s neighbors at Mar-a-Lago, got the contract to install a water filter. In neither case was there any bidding process, as usually happens for federal contracts - Trump just gave them public money.

The work was done, and lo, it was crappy. Algae started appearing in the pool, and the liner started peeling off the bottom. Trump flew into a rage and declared that the damage must be the work of unnamed “vandals”. Eventually, they found a culprit. A 67 year old man was seen leaning down to touch the broken lining and arrested by U.S. Park Police. Doug Burgum, a Trump crony who is Secretary of the Interior and hence in charge of the Park Police, declared the man - David Hearn, a former Olympian - to be the worst thing since DEI and threw the book at him.

Hearn was then indicted by U.S. attorney for Washington Jeanine Pirro, who vowed swift justice against the egregious sexagenarian. Never mind that nobody had actually seen the man damage the lining; that the extent of the damage is massive and extends into the middle of the pool, where it is unlikely a 67 year old man would have been able to rip up large portions of it; or that the peeling had first been spotted weeks before there was any evidence that he was anywhere near the pool.

A typical pattern was unfolding. Often when Trump corrodes and destroys institutions, it is for the dumbest of personal ends. Here you had the weaponization of federal law enforcement that we have all feared during Trump’s second term, but it was being directed at a hapless bystander rather than Hillary Clinton or the DNC. The damage was still very real - both for the independence of the institutions involved in persecuting the man and for Hearn himself, who could have faced ten years in prison.

The wheels of injustice began to grind, but then they got stuck. It became clear that the case was going to get thrown out of court, possibly with professional implications for the lawyers involved in pushing the absurd accusations. Pirro got cold feet and decided to drop the case, incurring Trump’s wrath.

Trump, whose connection to reality seems to grow ever weaker by the day, flew into another rage. He accused Pirro of being weak and out to get him, and is currently mulling firing her. Meanwhile Doug Burgum, who seems to have been instrumental in putting together the absurd accusations against Hearn and convincing Trump that they were true, is still secure in his job.

If Pirro is fired, it will be another sign that even if you are dedicated to 99% of Trump’s agenda, if you refuse to say that white is black when he demands it, you’re off the team. Meanwhile, we’re left mulling the fact that it took this completely absurd case for Pirro to push back on Trump, rather than, say, the egregious and systematic abuses of the civil rights of immigrants, or sending federal troops to occupy blue cities, or something else.

Oh, and the reflecting pool is still an absolute mess. But it was never really about that, was it?