As far as the controversy over the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool goes, Donald Trump is reverting to type: like any other Florida man with a pool, he won’t admit that maintaining one is complicated and blames external factors when things go wrong. The President ordered that a new blue coating be applied to the pool’s base, which has already started flaking. In a testy exchange with CBS’s Ed O’Keefe yesterday, Trump said that the contractors who installed the new surface were not to blame. “We had vandalism,” he said. “Probably a box cutter or a knife of some kind.”

“Who would think that somebody would go into a pool and take a knife and start cutting it?” he wondered aloud. Quite. The President also said that someone had put “fertilizer in the water” which attracted the algae that turned the pool green.

“Six people have been arrested, and seven people have been cited, for the damage they did to our Country’s now beautiful Reflecting Pool,” Trump wrote on Truth Social this morning. “The 350 foot gash, made by a very sharp knife or razors, is actually numerous slashes over a very long 350 foot length. It was purposefully and criminally done, and somebody had to work very hard, probably in the dark of night, to create such a condition.” He then shared some images of the pool appearing clear again.

The President’s critics have gleefully deployed the peeling coating and murky waters as a metaphor for Trump’s effect on Washington writ large. They lap it up when reporters such as the New York Times’s Maxine Joselow appear on Chris Hayes’s MS NOW show to recount details like how the material used on the bottom of the pool “is called Rhino Liner 5000” that is “typically used in truck bed liners and in pipes including water pipes and sewage pipes” and “not typically used in swimming pools or in large water basins like........

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