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Nominally, Jeanine Pirro is the U.S. attorney for D.C., appointed by Donald Trump and tasked with enforcing the law in the nation’s capital. In reality, Pirro’s job—like that of everyone else in Trump’s orbit—is to protect the president’s ego, image, and delusion. Pirro briefly confused these two roles recently, and it almost cost her her employment. It’s a lesson in how our government works now, and also, it involves the best story of the summer: the total disintegration of D.C.’s Reflecting Pool.

Sorry, start at the very beginning. What’s going on with the Reflecting Pool?

The Trump administration, as part of its program to beautify Washington, announced that it was going to “fix” the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, which had long been clouded by algae and generally not super nice to look at. Trump promised to make the pool nicer than ever before, with his team asserting that his predecessors were incompetent not to have done so. Except, of course, keeping a massive outdoor pool pristine and leak-free is complicated, and Trump’s renovation flopped: The algae came back, joined by pieces of the pool’s new lining floating in the water. Beyond that, it came out that the administration had awarded a “no-bid” contract to the firm tasked with making the pool great again, and that—per the National Park Service’s own analysis—the firm was benefiting from an excessive profit margin. The whole thing became a delicious metaphor for his second term: Claim you can easily fix something difficult, fail miserably, and get some corruption in along the way.

OK, but what does this have to do with Judge Jeanine?

Well, Trump couldn’t just take responsibility for his pool flop, and so he did what he often does: He made up a bunch of stuff. In this case, he blamed vandals for damaging the pool. It was briefly funny,........

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