In an earlier post, I wrote about President Trump’s two-part strategy for deflecting blame for his failures. One part is to create criminals, either by calling them names (“stupid,” he likes a lot) or actually going after them with federal charges. The other part is to create what I call camouflage, or you might call a smokescreen, or just utter bullshit.
I mean, Trump uses these two strategies every time he answers reporters’ questions, sometimes even criminalizing the questioner by calling him or her stupid. I was particularly struck yesterday by the president’s use of these two strategies to the extreme when questioned about why the DC Reflecting Pool had turned green with algae after he had the entire pool drained and resurfaced.
First, he said five people had been arrested for causing the problem by using a knife to cut a slit in the pool’s surface about 300 feet in length. He didn’t say when they did this, presumably before the pool was refilled, which begs the question: Why wasn’t it fixed when found? He said another five suspects were still on the loose.
“I can’t help it if somebody goes in with a knife and starts hacking it up,” he said.
He also said some “vandals” (same ones?) had poured fertilizer into the pool, causing the algae problem and turning the pool green. To get rid of the green, National Park Service personnel have been pouring hydrogen peroxide into the pool. The result has been Trump’s blue paint job peeling off and being salvaged by tourists as souvenirs.
Now for some more camouflage in addition to the fertilizer: He cited the failures of both President Obama and President Biden to fix the pool, though they announced plans in the hundreds of millions of dollars to do so. Of course, Trump was able to complete the whole project for $15 million in two months, compared to his predecessors’ years-long (unfinished) projects.
Trump even issued a warning to Reflecting Pool criminals on Truth Social: “Please remember that there is a 10 year prison sentence for the destruction, or even the attempted destruction, of such things – Which will be fully enforced!”
The pool was designed more than a century ago to connect the Washington Monument with the Lincoln Memorial
