IT WAS FITTING in the context of the most bizarre and tone-deaf midterm efforts by any president in US history that Donald Trump, on the cusp of the lame duck era of his presidency, would choose a pond as the backdrop for his final feather-ruffling speech.

And not just any pond. He chose the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, the recreation spot of choice for DC’s duck population, which has itself become a metaphor for the grift, incompetence and vindictiveness that has characterised Trump’s presidency.

While midterm strategists swallowed anguished screams of frustration and despair, Trump spent the first 23 minutes of his final address before the midterms describing the renovations to the Reflecting Pool in forensic detail, and of course, adding a few embellishments of his own.

Alamy Stock Photo Alamy Stock Photo

On the eve of any midterm race, the US President delivers a final bracing pep talk that motivates his party’s voters to head to the polling stations in droves and pull the lever for his candidates. Instead, recalcitrant Republicans and MAGA voters were treated to a treatise on pipe repairs, rebar replacements and drainage alterations.

Not to mention a lecture on the finer points of waterproofing. And of course, Trump persisted in his baseless claims that the initial renovations had been vandalised and even managed to imply that ‘dirty cop’ and former FBI Director James Comey had inspired the culprits.

On and on he droned at the Reflecting Pool’s edge, a lame duck incapable of self-reflection,........

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