Mine is bigger than yours ...

Mangel Ngan / AFP / Getty

Mine is bigger that yours, a game played by little boys regarding toys and now, by the orange menace, our beloved president unfortunately experiencing free fall as we speak.

Never in my life have I rooted so hard for algae. In fact, I’ve never rooted for algae at all. Yet the sight of those tiny green organisms floating in the Reflecting Pool, absorbing sunlight, multiplying their little hearts out and living their best (presumably very short) lives, fills me with joy.

Among the Trump administration’s many debacles, the greening of the Reflecting Pool is uniquely delightful. Every other Donald Trump farce contains elements of tragedy. Whatever schadenfreude we might otherwise feel from the president’s haphazard “Liberation Day” tariffs or cycle of threat and submission toward Iran
is leavened with concern or even horror for the collateral damage. We feel bad for our country, however tremendous the content may be.

The Reflecting Pool episode captures most of Trump’s governing pathologies (corruption, incompetence, authoritarian menace, absurd lies) without any of the normal attendant consequences. It is pure,
meaningless fun.

Meaningless to everybody, that is, except Trump.

Chipped paint and algae are visible in the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in Washington, DC,
on June 21. Aaron Schwartz/Reuters

Starting in April, the president began to boast, over and over, about his renovations. The new pool would be “beautiful,” “incredible.” The president had the foresight to line the bottom with a sealant that would last at least 50 years, perhaps 100. He showed reporters a chart depicting the pool dwarfing skyscrapers in size (if you laid the skyscrapers on their side, which obviates their most impressive attribute). This was a strange subject to obsess about in the midst of a war, yet the president’s enthusiasm for the topic seemed contagious. MAGA accounts on social media gloried in the incredible triumph of turning the pool blue.

But soon green algae appeared on the water. Workers were dispatched to pour bottles of hydrogen peroxide into the basin. The impermeable sealant began peeling off, possibly because of substandard quality, or perhaps because hydrogen peroxide is used as a paint stripper.

It gets better.

Incompetence by cronies seems like a plausible hypothesis for the failure. But to question the quality of the work would be to question Trump himself. And so the president responded in the characteristic fashion he employs in the face of all setbacks, especially self-created ones.

He blamed the failure on sabotage by unnamed enemies: vandals undermining his great project. Even though Trump had previously boasted that the new floor was impenetrable—“If you had a knife, you can’t even cut it. So strong, so powerful”—and even though it was constantly surrounded by witnesses with cameras,
these vandals had somehow managed to cut it open. “They took some form of knife or blade, and put a 250 foot long gash into the beautiful facade of what took so much work, competence, and money to build and complete,” he wrote Saturday on Truth Social. “They also poured corrosive and destructive chemicals into the Pool.”

By Monday morning, Trump claimed, in another post, that the gash was 300 feet long. When he met with reporters in the Oval Office on Monday afternoon, the gash had grown to 350 feet, and rather than having poured “corrosive and destructive chemicals” into the beautiful water, the vandals had done something quite different from, and close to the opposite of, that. “Somebody said they might have put fertilizer. They did something to create the algae,” he explained.

In closing ...

Firm that worked on past Reflecting Pool renovation passed on Trump project
after deeming it ‘unfeasible’

Deeming Trump's administration as unfeasible, also sounds like a plan. :)

And so it goes. K. Vonnegut