The reflecting pool saga keeps getting weirder

This is straight out of a Christopher Guest mockumentary.

John J. Cafaro, the comic book crook Trump hired to clean the reflecting pool

Listen—I have never been particularly invested in our national reflecting pool, much like I did not care about the Four Seasons Total Landscaping in Philly before Giuliani accidentally held a press conference next to a porn shop. But much like with the Four Seasons disaster, the dumpster fire Trump has created for no reason with this reflecting pool “repair”—and some of the hard-to-believe characters and details that have surfaced from the drama—has turned out to be one of the most entertaining political own goals of this century. A TV writers’ room would balk.

It started when Trump demanded national attention on his reflecting pool renovation earlier this month, in the middle of the Iran war, by holding up this bizarre chart that showed its size compared to various skyscrapers. Reporters expected a serious press conference with national security updates on June 3, and instead, the president spent much of the time bragging about the length of a pool that someone else built in 1922.

Trump bragged about his plan to spend $14 million to paint the bottom of the pool, which had been a concrete grey color, “American flag blue” and posted dozens of times on Truth Social about how his reflecting pool would be better than Obama’s. In other words, he dreaded the ego blow of having to accept an Iran deal that’s objectively worse than Obama’s and needed to defeat Obama in some visual, demonstrable way, and one thing Trump should be better at than Obama is renovating pools, right? A guaranteed win.

Unfortunately, Trump has only ever dealt with swimming pools in his professional life and, being anti-science, failed to consult actual scientists about how to deal with a body of non-chlorinated standing water. The dark blue paint color he chose immediately warmed up the water and fueled an algae overgrowth that turned it murky and green. Embarrassed, he sent in National Park Service employees to dump containers of hydrogen peroxide into the pool to try and kill the algae quickly, which only caused an overgrowth of a new genus of green algae. Meanwhile, the peroxide caused the blue paint to peel off the bottom, creating an even more humiliating situation for him in which tourists flocked to collect peeling paint chunks at the reflecting pool as a relic of this ruined regime, much like people collected pieces of the crumbled Berlin Wall.

The situation escalated from there: Protesters wearing “Team Algae” shirts began to gather at the pool, some of them chanting, “Let’s go algae, let’s go (clap clap).” Right-wing reporters showed up to the pool to claim Democrats were lying about it being green, while CNN reporters collected samples of the nasty water live on camera. Random pool repair guys with mullets traveled from other states to gaze upon and diagnose this monumental pool failure in interviews with reporters.

As America’s collective fascination with the shade of the pool grew, some incredible new details emerged about some of the players involved. Trump had awarded a lucrative no-bid contract to one of his cronies, a crook with a rap sheet and a bribery scandal named John J. Cafaro, who somehow looks like this:

But it gets better. The name of Cafaro’s company that was hired to make the reflecting pool blue (and not green!!) is…. wait for it…

Greenwater Services. You can’t make this shit up.

Naturally, as media narratives around this whole saga turned unrelentingly bad for Trump, he came up with a plan to spin this as not his fault: Trump claimed, without evidence, that left-wing “vandals” were dumping algae and chemicals into the pool and slashing the paint to embarrass him, and he sent the National Guard to stand around the pool and arrest anyone who touched it. (They’ve already arrested a 67-year-old Olympian, David Hearn, for “destruction of government property,” which is ridiculous considering that Trump pardoned all the guys who smeared literal shit on the walls inside the U.S. Capitol.)

Trump now laments that he will have to drain the pool and start over—not because he flushed $14 million down the toilet in a failed attempt to beat Obama at something, but because the left is pro-algae and hates America. He even found a specific journalist to blame: “Lightweight ABC Reporter, Jonathan Karl, was seen sticking his hand into the Pool, and trying to rip the rubber off of the surface,” Trump wrote on Truth Social this weekend. Meanwhile, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt called the media “deranged” yesterday for focusing on the reflecting pool story over other things happening in the world—nevermind that it was Trump, himself, who literally forced us to change the subject from the Iran war to this dumb fucking pool.

It’s unclear to me, at this point, if there is any scandal that could turn off Trump’s core base. At least 30% of the country will buy his excuses about what happened with the pool because they’re in a cult, and the right-wing pundits are parroting Trump’s story about vandals and saboteurs. The rest of the Americans who see devastating images of dead ducklings floating in algae-plagued water will recognize this as a metaphor for Trump’s entire presidency: Claim something is broken because of a previous president, spend a fortune trying to fix it, make the problem exponentially worse, and blame others when things go south.