We have actual adults in positions of immense power bickering over a clearly made-up story about pool vandals, a story that led to an innocent American having his life turned upside down.
Charges dropped against Olympian in Reflecting Pool case
Federal prosecutors dropped charges against Olympian David Hearn after officials blamed Reflecting Pool damage on contractor work.
It takes a special kind of stupid to turn the rehabbing of a national monument like the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool into a full-blown presidential scandal. But President Donald Trump found a way to pull it off, creating a wet, ogre-colored metaphor for his administration’s stumbling lack of focus, casual dishonesty and utter inability to govern.
In the most recent development, Trump’s Department of Justice on July 31 dropped ridiculous charges it had filed against former Olympian David Hearn, falsely claiming he had ripped up part of the pool’s new lining. You’ll recall the president was rushing to “fix” the Reflecting Pool prior to the July 4 celebration of America’s 250th anniversary. The work was clearly a bust from the start, as algae returned to the pool almost instantly and we all saw ample photographic evidence of the liner swiftly deteriorating and peeling up.
Unable to simply admit he screwed up a multimillion government project that nobody asked for, Trump concocted a tale of “vandals” he alleged had gashed the new pool liner with box cutters. He claimed these vandals were, of course, radical, America-hating leftists. Hearn and other pool visitors were swept up in the ginned-up fervor, targets of a feeble executive in need of arrests.
Trump’s Reflecting Pool fiasco perfectly reflects his inability to lead
All but the most brainwashed among us knew this was a desperate fiction spun by an addled, aging narcissist. And we were right.
In a motion to dismiss the charges against Hearn, U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro wrote that “the damage was the result of a botched installation and not vandalism,” and that the Interior Department had withheld information in a push to falsely blame vandals for the damage.
None other than President Trump snapped back at Pirro – part of his own Justice Department – writing on social media: “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?”
Now Trump is fighting with Pirro, who’s also fighting with Burgum
Interior Department Secretary Doug Burgum also got mad at Pirro, writing on X: “The evidence is clear, vandals have repeatedly caused damage to the Reflecting Pool.”
The evidence is about as clear as the algae-covered Reflecting Pool. And if these mopes had video evidence of teams of boxcutter-wielding antifa frogmen descending on the Reflecting Pool under cover of darkness to do massive destruction, they would have aired that video everywhere and quite literally never shut up about it.
They have nothing, aside from their own incompetence. Period.
But I do love seeing these assorted losers fight. They’re doing a perfect job showing the American people the bungling uselessness of the Trump administration.
Trump is handling the Iran war about as well as the Reflecting Pool
Looking past the pool fiasco, consider how well things are going on the war front.
On July 31, for approximately the umpteenth time, Trump and Co. spread rumors that U.S. forces would launch a massive weekend attack on Iran. Massive attacks, you see, are always rumored to be coming on weekends, when the financial markets are closed.
Rumors about peace deals, on the other hand, come at the end of the weekend, just before the markets open on Monday. Predictably, Trump wound up calling off the massive strikes because a peace deal, he claims, is just around the corner. And so it shall be until next weekend, when the same cycle will start again. One step backward, one step forward, a quick fall down the stairs, repeat.
Meanwhile, food and gas prices are still high, Trump’s approval sinks ever lower and – here’s the important part – the administration does nothing to make anyone’s life better.
Trump administration seems incapable of doing anything right
You want another example of shrugging incompetence?
State Department officials were part of a recent global conference on AIDS in Brazil. During the U.S. presentation, there was a slide showing a map of Africa that mislabeled every country.
Per NBC News: “The map showed Nigeria, where the U.S. has several hundred troops deployed, as landlocked in the Sahara. Mozambique, which is in southeastern Africa, was relocated to the Horn of Africa, while Ivory Coast in West Africa was placed on the other side of the continent.”
That’s small potatoes relative to war or the Reflecting Pool cock-up, but it’s a perfect illustration of an administration that is, top-to-bottom, fundamentally bad at its job. Or as Republicans in Congress seem content to say, perfect.
Trump’s administration is wreaking havoc, and it will get worse
We have actual adults in positions of immense power bickering over a clearly made-up story about pool vandals, a story that led to an innocent American having his life turned upside down by the government.
We have a war stuck in an endless loop with zero confidence that the liar in chief is capable of finding a way out.
And we have daily embarrassments on the domestic front and the international stage, thanks to unqualified hacks who know survival under the clothes-less King Trump requires slavish fealty and relentless lying.
Put simply, this stinks. And it’s not going to get better. The Reflecting Pool debacle could have and should have been dealt with swiftly and put to bed. But it has been going on for months, and it keeps getting stupider.
Welcome to America in the second Trump presidency. Please excuse our mess.
Follow USA TODAY columnist Rex Huppke on Bluesky at @rexhuppke.bsky.social and on Facebook at facebook.com/RexIsAJerk.