Donald Trump is as smart as he is honest. He thought he could illegally hand out a no-bid $14 million contract to his pool guy to give a national monument a gaudy paint job, and then crow about how ONLY he (and a can of paint) could fix the problems that have plagued the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool for over 100 years. Well, science is always here to slap that despot down to size. And science says… that a shallow pool in warm DC temps is a breeding ground for algae. Again, Trump is not the first president to oversee an algae bloom at the Reflecting Pool. But he is the first president to have obnoxiously derided his predecessors and petulantly insist that HIS renovations would solve all previous ills.

We talked last week about how the algae — blooming so fast that “American flag blue” is covered up by soylent green — was quickly followed by a new problem: the (hidden) blue paint is already peeling. Equally viable explanations for this include A) his pool guy, who has accurately been compared to a cartoon villain, is as good at painting as Don is at presidenting, or B) the oodles of hydrogen peroxide they’ve been pouring into the pool, to combat the algae, accelerated the separation between paint and surface. Both of those put the blame with Trump, though, which he can’t fathom, so instead he rage-tweeted over the weekend about how VANDALS! were to blame for ripping up the paint.

Lock the vandals up! In a pair of posts Saturday on Truth Social, Trump, without evidence, blamed vandals for the damage to the pool and said the alleged crimes could warrant “years in jail.” “Who would do such a thing? These are very serious crimes having to do with the destruction of National Monuments,” Trump said in one post. The 2,030-foot pool, which sits at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial, has been beset by an algae bloom as workers refilled it after they gave the floor a new “American flag blue” coat of sealant. That coating has begun to peel off, with chunks appearing above the surface of the water.

Time to drain the swamp: Trump said that he had met with contractors Saturday and that much of the water might have to be drained to repair the pool’s floor. “What these terrible Vandals have done is a true affront to both Presidents George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, and should be dealt with accordingly,” Trump said in the second post. “They took some form of knife or blade, and put a 250 foot long gash into the beautiful facade of what took so much work, competence, and money to build and complete,” he added. “They also poured corrosive and destructive chemicals into the Pool.”

Olympic canoeist David Hearn briefly touched a piece of peeled coating: Hearn, 67, said he made his way to the pool at the end of a bike ride “to satisfy my curiosity as a citizen of what was happening with all the algae and the peeling blue coating that I’ve been seeing in the news.” … “I didn’t remove, tear, rip, break or destroy any of it. The condition of the reflecting pool was the same after I stepped away from the water as it was before I got there.”

Hearn was arrested and detained for 5 hours: Hearn said the National Guard member who arrested him was unable to answer which federal law he had violated. The National Guard did not immediately respond to a request for comment. “All of a sudden they were handcuffing me behind my back, and they hadn’t really told me what I was charged with,” Hearn said. Earlier Saturday, Trump shared an article on social media about Hearn’s arrest. The U.S. Park Police did not immediately respond to a request for information on any arrests.

[From NBC News, headers added]

“They also poured corrosive and destructive chemicals into the Pool.” Um, excuse me Hector Projector, YOU’RE the one who did that! I mean, not Trump himself, I’m sure jugs of hydrogen peroxide are too heavy for his baby fists to carry, but his people dumped out that solution. And true, hydrogen peroxide is a milder treatment than chlorine. But it’s still strong enough to have affected the paint/sealant/coating. In large enough quantities, it can even be toxic to animals, and I am very sorry to report that as of Sunday there has been one confirmed duck fatality in the Reflecting Pool. Meanwhile Olympian David Hearn now has to appear in court on July 9 after they charged him with destruction of government property, and it seems the National Guard has been deployed to the Pool. Great, I hope they arrest some algae.

All this would have been hilarious as an episode of Veep; as real life, it’s a tragedy.

Photos credit: MediaPunch/Backgrid and via YouTube