Reflections on the Reflecting Pool
By 
I confess to a certain morbid fascination regarding what’s going on with Donald Trump’s Reflecting Pool obsession.
The story here seems to originate in Trump somehow becoming aware that the Obama administration spent $35 million on renovations/repairs to the pool. In characteristic fashion this has since become $100 million spent by Obama and Biden (The Biden administration didn’t spend any money on it and the $100 million figure comes straight out of Trump’s feculent ass. I assume Trump was put onto this entire stupid topic by one of the many crazed racists with an Obama obsession floating around the upper echelons of the American right wing).
So Trump got the idea to “fix” the Reflecting Pool, by making it more American and manly and strong and powerful, just in time for the celebration of his and America’s birthdays. Also in characteristic fashion, he just ignored federal regulations governing these kinds of jobs and handed the project to a Mar-a-Lago crony, in the form of a lucrative no-bid contract. This person, who happens to look just like a low-level enforcer for a minor Mafia family, then proceeded to spend $14 million, which was several times more than Trump promised the job would cost. The job appears to have been done in a shoddy/incompetent/corrupt way (surprise!), which has transformed the Reflecting Pool into an algae-ridden swamp (ironic).
This brings us to the latest installment of the saga, which is Trump’s spiraling obsession about the existence of some sort of conspiracy to destroy the strong and powerful beauty of the Reflecting Pool. This conspiracy, by parties as yet unnamed, is being carried out in two ways:
(1) By using a box cutter or knife to cut a gash or slit in the polyurea coating lining the concrete basin. This gash or slit — he has used both terms — was described by Trump as 250 feet long yesterday morning. By early afternoon he was claiming it was “290 or 300 feet long,” and by later in the same press conference he was saying it was 350 feet long.
(2) By dumping fertilizer and possibly other substances into the Reflecting Pool’s water.
The sheer insanity of this is hard to appreciate fully. First, the Reflecting Pool is in a very heavily trafficked public space that is also a major tourist attraction. It’s surrounded by all kinds of surveillance technology, as any such space is these days, especially in Washington D.C. In other words, it would be completely impossible to carry out any kind of covert sabotage operation at any scale.
Second, the causal theory here is completely bananas. How would one cut a several hundred foot slit into a polyurea coating with a box cutter or knife? This by itself would be nearly impossible to do — it’s a very tough, one might even say strong and powerful, substance — let alone doing so surreptitiously. As an extra added feature to all this madness, Trump himself was babbling back on May 4th about how it would be impossible to attack the Reflecting Pool with a knife, because it was was so strong and powerful, although he didn’t want to give anyone any ideas.
Third, what would the point be of doing this impossible thing, even if it were somehow possible? Why would cutting a several hundred foot slit in the pool’s protective coating turn it into an algae-choked swamp? What is the theory here exactly? What is the frequency Kenneth?
One theory about Trump’s most surreal/flagrant/insane lies is that they’re power plays of a classic authoritarian sort:
FWIW I don’t think that’s what’s going on in this specific case. I think Trump at least sort of believes in his giant slit in the pool conspiracy theory, because he is now, to use the technical clinical term, completely koo koo for cocoa puffs.
We’ve got to get out of this place, if it’s the last thing we ever do.