Trump’s Reflecting Pool mess makes the transition from debacle to scandal
Donald Trump’s Reflecting Pool renovation project was already an embarrassing fiasco. The president obsessed over the renovation project, which he apparently saw as a metaphor of sorts: He would tackle a lingering problem that had vexed previous administrations, while delivering impressive results quickly and cheaply.
It wouldn’t just be a triumph for his presidency, it would be a totemic success story, demonstrating how Trump’s unique approach to problem-solving is fundamentally superior to what Americans have come to expect from traditional officials.
We soon learned otherwise. Indeed, reality quickly left little doubt that the water was too green, the costs were too high, the no-bid contract was too indefensible, the timeline was too long, the blue paint floated to the surface too often, and the draining and refilling of the pool was too frequent.
The Republican proved the opposite of his intended point. Instead of demonstrating the superiority of his model, he offered timely evidence that his approach — rooted in cutting corners, controversial contracts, rushed timelines, etc. — simply doesn’t work.
So the president began assuring the public in June he’d actually succeeded beautifully, until “vandals” intervened and ruined his triumph. It was these villainous rascals, he insisted, who deserved the blame for his failure.
To that end, Trump’s Justice Department actually indicted someone in early July, charging former Olympian David Hearn with one felony count of destruction of property. Late Friday afternoon — a time when the administration invariably releases news it doesn’t want Americans to see — the case collapsed. MS NOW reported:
The Department of Justice moved to drop felony charges Friday against former Olympian David Hearn after acknowledging that damage to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool was caused by a flawed installation rather than vandalism.
The motion to dismiss was filed by D.C. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro after prosecutors concluded that the damage attributed to Hearn stemmed from defects in the installation of the Reflecting Pool’s liner. The filing said information obtained after the indictment showed the damage was caused by “botched work” performed by the project’s contractor, not by criminal conduct.
In the wake of the filing, common sense might have suggested the White House would have wanted this story to disappear from the discourse as quickly as possible, but Trump had other ideas.
A day after the Justice Department backed off its criminal case, the president took aim at his own loyalist. “I disagree 100% with Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, on the Reflecting Pool. I don’t know what she was thinking?” he wrote in a message posted Saturday to his social media platform. “To me, it was a pure case of VANDALISM. … There may have been some contractor difficulty, but the major damage was caused by VANDALS!”
Despite the increasingly obvious fact that such criminals don’t exist outside of Trump’s imagination, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum also insisted Saturday, “The evidence is clear, vandals have repeatedly caused damage to the Reflecting Pool.”
He offered no such “evidence.”
Democratic Rep. Ted Lieu of California, a member of the House Judiciary Committee, wrote online, “Democrats will investigate. November is coming.”
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Steve Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.”
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