The ongoing saga of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool has become a “hilarious reminder” of President Donald Trump’s incompetence, according to a columnist who argues that the debacle underlines his MAGA base’s powerful attachment to his failings.
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The pool, recently repainted under Trump’s direction, has turned murky and algae-covered, with the paint visibly peeling, and rather than acknowledge a botched renovation, the president has pushed a theory that vandals attacked the pool with a box cutter – a claim that directly contradicts his own earlier boasts and strains credulity, argued Salon’s Amanda Marcotte.
“Although such an act would require blade skills beyond even the greatest of samurai, federal authorities have arrested five people,” she wrote.
The episode reveals something deeper about the MAGA psyche, according to Marcotte, who said the outside saboteurs conspiracy theory is “painfully stupid,” but it has nonetheless spread among Republican lawmakers and conservative media.
“Do these people believe this silly lie?” she wondered. “With MAGA, it’s always hard to distinguish the line between self-serving tales and genuine delusion. Ultimately, it’s irrelevant: What matters more is why right-wingers are burrowing so deeply into this nonsense. Like Trump, they want an excuse to arrest people for laughing at them. It really isn’t deeper than that.”
“Just as Trump is too egotistical to admit he screwed up the iconic Reflecting Pool, his followers cannot stomach admitting liberals were right all along about how stupid it was to vote for him,” Marcotte added.
Admitting the pool renovation’s failure was self-inflicted would force MAGA voters to confront something uncomfortable about themselves, Marcotte wrote, so embracing his vandalism narrative lets his followers avoid that reckoning altogether.
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“There’s a lot of power in that fantasy for his base, so much so that there is no way they can ever admit that Trump did a bad job on the Reflecting Pool because it’s such a stark symbol of how he really can’t do anything right,” Marcotte wrote. “The pool isn’t the only hilarious reminder this week that Trump’s incompetence is only equaled by his narcissism.”
The Reflecting Pool debacle echoes the legal dispute involving the Kennedy Center, where Trump’s name was removed by court order and the building was subsequently covered with a tarp — another instance of obscuring an embarrassment rather than addressing it directly, Marcotte wrote.
“Trump’s motivations aren’t mysterious. He’s slapping his name on other people’s accomplishments and trying to claim credit,” she wrote. “Being solely focused on getting attention, he cannot distinguish between those remembered fondly and those, like Hitler, who murdered millions. All that matters is trying to obscure that the only thing he’ll be remembered for is his corruption, criminality and utter inability to accomplish much of anything of note.”
The 80-year-old president has suggested the pool, which was completed in 1922, was somehow his own accomplishment, and Marcotte said the botched renovation and ongoing efforts to shield Trump from accountability were a microcosm of the entire MAGA project.
“Most people would be embarrassed to be associated with such a silly fraud, but the MAGA base keeps eating this up,” Marcotte wrote. “Trump is the president for every C student who blames ‘affirmative action’ for not getting into a better school. He’s the champion for fifth-place swimmers who point the finger at trans athletes when they didn’t do better themselves. For failed sons who whine about Black and female officers because they didn’t rise higher in the military ranks.”
“Of course they will delude themselves into believing ‘vandals’ broke the pool Trump obviously messed up,” she concluded. “The alternative is to look at their own reflections — and they wouldn’t like what they would see.”
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