Decorating with Donald: a very special update
By 
What the hell is going on here?
President Trump said that his handpicked contractor would charge only $1.8 million to repair the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool and paint it blue.
The actual cost is now more than seven times that, after the Interior Department nearly doubled the size of the contract late last week, federal records show.
On Friday, the Interior Department added $6.2 million to the contract’s previous cost, saying it now planned to pay $13.1 million to a Virginia firm called Atlantic Industrial Coatings. President Trump said he chose that company to repair the landmark because the firm had worked on the swimming pools at his golf club in Sterling, Va.
The government awarded that firm a no-bid contract last month, bypassing the requirement to seek competing offers by saying that the situation was so urgent that any delay would cause “serious injury” to the government. The government has not publicly said what that injury would have been.
Instead, it has cited Mr. Trump’s desire to get the work done before the country’s 250th birthday on July 4.
Public contracting records do not say why the contract’s cost increased so sharply on Friday. Katie Martin, a spokeswoman for the Interior Department, said that the higher price “reflects the effort necessary to expedite the timeline of completing the leak prevention coating project — more people, more materials, more equipment and longer hours ahead of our 250th.”
Atlantic Industrial Coatings did not respond to questions about the increase.
But government documents obtained by The New York Times show that the contract’s current value matches, down to the dollar, an offer submitted to the government by Atlantic Industrial Coatings in the middle of last month. That offer included a 20 percent profit margin, the documents show.
Competitive bidding laws aim to ensure that the government is getting a fair price from its vendors. . . .
On Monday, a nonprofit dedicated to landscape architecture filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Washington seeking to halt the paint job. The Cultural Landscape Foundation said that the Trump administration had ignored a law requiring advance scrutiny of projects that alter historic landmarks.
The foundation, based in Washington, said in its lawsuit that “every day that the resurfacing continues, the historic character of the Reflecting Pool is being further and fundamentally altered.”
Let us ponder the imponderables here:
(1) The only reason anybody knows any of this is going on, most especially including the magical overnight transformation of a $1.8 million no-bid contract into a $13.1 million no-bid contract, is because Trump can’t stop running his stupid fucking mouth about it. He started boasting about this fantastically important and necessary government project during a wholly unrelated Oval Office event last month. A visitor from Germany, he said, had looked into the Reflecting Pool and had been appalled by how dirty the water was. That’s why it was necessary for Trump, who one might think had other tasks to perform as president, to get intimately involved with repainting the pool American flag blue, in time for the nation’s 250th birthday. Trump then made extra sure to produce more journalistic scrutiny, and generate a federal lawsuit for good measure, by holding a media event last week:
President Donald Trump on Thursday went on an unannounced trip to the Lincoln Memorial to see the Reflecting Pool after he had it coated in a color he calls “American flag blue.”
He did more than just see it — the Republican president was driven across the new coating before he got out of his SUV to make a statement and answer questions from reporters who had been taken there to await his arrival before the sun set.
The new blue coating will hide the pool’s gray stone, a color Trump said was “never good.” The project cost nearly $2 million, he said.
(2) Why did Trump quote a price for this already extremely sketchy transaction that was 13.7% of the actual price, which as the NYT story points out was specified down to the dollar in the actual no-bid contract from last month? Reflexive lying about everything? Confusion? Deteriorating memory?
(3) Is Trump getting a piece of the action here? How much should it cost to “repair leaking joints between the pool’s concrete slabs, waterproof the pool’s bottom, and paint it a shade called “American flag blue.” I myself, based on doing my own research, have concluded that this work should run at something between $7,231 and eleventybillion dollars, so it might have been nice to have a competitive bidding process, which — just taking another wild guess here — can’t actually be circumvented legally speaking by claiming that it’s a national emergency that this prissy old man, caked over with more makeup and hair spray than Gustav von Aschenbach, yet somehow still masquerading successfully as the world’s most macho macho man to his moron followers, get his Beautiful American Flag Blue Reflecting Pool before America’s (and his) very very special birthday party.
Summing up: This one story would by itself be a major scandal in a normal presidential administration, but literally won’t make the top 500 such items in Trump’s second term. Furthermore, the scandal is completely self-generated: it would no doubt have taken months, if not years, and most likely forever and a day, for it to come to the attention of the media and the legal system if Trump wasn’t flouncing about babbling about his latest adventure in redecoration, in the middle of the Iraq war, the looming recession etc. etc.
This stupid country.