Trump Is Drowning Us All in His Green Slime Crisis
Kermit the Frog said it best: It’s not easy being green. And now the Reflecting Pool, sickly green with algae, is D.C.’s top tourist attraction, a metaphor for what Trump has done to curdle his presidency. Another top stop for gawkers is the tarps hanging at the Kennedy Center, a cover-up in plain sight ostensibly in place to obscure possible damage done to the marble when Trump’s name was yanked off—and, deep down, to protect Trump’s fragile ego from public scrutiny.
Trump’s handling of the mess made at both landmarks is typical for him: deflect blame and hide the truth. In the case of the Reflecting Pool, he’s alleged that the debacle is largely thanks to anti-government vandals, suggesting without evidence that someone(s) with a knife or a boxcutter slit the recently-installed blue rubber sheath from the bottom of one end of the historic water feature to the other, 350 feet in all, upending a nearly $15 million upgrade that Trump boasted would last fifty, maybe a hundred years.
Questioned how anyone could pull off such a crime amid the continued presence of National Guard troops, not to mention all those tourists and their cameras, Trump said simply that, “I saw it.” (A New York Times account has challenged Trump’s assertion that the damage was manmade, but rather nature asserting itself.)
The president told reporters that they would see this evidence in court, where his handpicked U.S. Attorney, Judge........
