Make America Green Again. (Photo by Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images)
Donald Trump spent millions and millions of taxpayer dollars on a no-bid contract to paint the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool blue. Based on his contemporary public statements, Trump believed this would make the Reflecting Pool more aesthetically pleasing – no, patriotic – shade of blue. Instead, the pool is an iridescent shade of green, filled with floating chunks of peeling paint and dead ducks.
Some, like those of us who have had to maintain swimming pools, might recognize that algae grows naturally in stagnant water. If you fail to balance water chemistry correctly, this will show. We also understand that this turns the water green, regardless of how blue the coating is.
For this reason, any renovation that involves sealing the pool and then painting the floor will end up requiring constant maintenance. And not only hydrogen peroxide spillbecause killing the algae is just the opening step before vacuuming debris from the bottom. Because dead algae decompose to produce… the building blocks of other algae. With apologies to Kermit the Frog, it’s very easy to be green when it comes to standing water.
Rather than admit that their renovations turned the Reflecting Pool into a swamp, the Trump administration chose another path.
Yes, paint falls off if cut in the middle with a knife!
Now the administration has stationed military guards around the Reflecting Pool to harass people who come too close. Jeanine Pirro, his hapless U.S. attorney in DC, vows to put the full weight of her office — which failed to prosecute someone for throwing a sandwich — is on the case. As James Downie said it:
Trump’s desperate attempts to blame the failure of his renovation on “vandals” deserve nothing but mockery and contempt. But the arrests show the extent to which he and his cronies have corrupted the Justice Department, forcing prosecutors to prey on citizens to support the president’s smallest deceptions. If Democrats take back one or both chambers of Congress this fall, they should exercise wide-ranging oversight to shine a light on these abuses as much as possible. The next Democratic president should ask the Justice Department to rebuild and strengthen its internal controls against professional misconduct. And a Democratic president should work with Congress, the courts, and the bars to hold accountable those who have abused the formidable power of the DOJ.
You would think that a guy who owns a swimming pool, that’s one of the places where he would lose key documents rather than comply with investigators and a known place where he classified documents illegally hiddenafter all, surely knows that algae grows in stagnant water. But it’s also important to remember that the golden billionaire sincerely believes that his supporters are poor and stupid. Trump is the kind of guy who believes swimming pools are the domain of luxury homes, not something millions of lower-middle-class homeowners in Florida and Texas have in their backyards. He thinks he can pull the wool over their eyes because he doesn’t think they know how a swimming pool works.
And to maintain his lie, he asks the Department of Justice to drop everything and launch another doomed prosecution against a few poor saps who stood by while nature took its own, entirely inevitable course.
That said, if anyone asks me why my personal pool turned greener and greener when I forgot to shock it this weekend, I’m calling on the FBI to start looking for the pinko communists who did this to me too. Get both eyes of Kash Patel on this case!
Joe Patrice is an editor at Above the Law and co-host of Think like a lawyer. Please feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics and a healthy dose of college sports news.
