David Dayen is the executive editor of The American Prospect.
He suggests that the saga of the Reflecting Pool is a metaphor for the Trump administration’s incompetence, mendaciousness, corruption, and unwillingness to accept responsibility. This, with its tales of vandals dumping fertilizer and slitting the paint with a knife, may be a lasting metaphor for the Trump era.
The Reflecting Pool and the killer rabbit
Donald Trump’s second term is being defined for the public in real time.
One day in April 1979, Jimmy Carter was out fishing alone in a Plains, Georgia, pond during a brief vacation away from the White House. What he described as a “swamp rabbit” started swimming toward the boat, teeth bared and “hissing menacingly.” Carter, separated from the Secret Service, was on his own. He wielded his paddle and swatted in the rabbit’s direction; it changed course.
None of this would have been more than an amusing anecdote Carter told staff if an Associated Press reporter hadn’t gone out drinking with White House press secretary Jody Powell a few months later, in the dead of a Washington summer. (Powell later said it was over a cup of tea; OK, sure.) Powell let slip the killer rabbit story, and the reporter, having nothing else to cover in August, wrote it up. The Washington Post put it on the front page (“Bunny Goes Bugs: Rabbit Attacks President”), and fashioned a parody Jaws movie poster to illustrate the story, with the moniker “PAWS.” (Do rabbits have paws? Never mind, we’re on a roll.) This was a big media story for at least a week, and after Carter lost the presidency, Ronald Reagan’s team found a picture of the incident taken by a White House photographer and released it, giving the story more legs, or paws.
The story became something Washington reporters just love: a synecdoche. Though nothing really happened, Carter getting attacked by a killer rabbit became a symbol of a feckless presidency, the paddle splash symbolic of his flailing amid global crises like the Iran hostage situation. Carter was seen as weak, or at least that was the red meat served up by Reagan’s campaign. And the killer rabbit fit that narrative, and was easy enough for the public to understand.
We’re seeing that dynamic now in real time with Donald Trump and the green Reflecting Pool. This isn’t the most important story, or the biggest example of Trumpian corruption, incompetence, humiliation (it took a bigger body of water, the Strait of Hormuz, to do that), or conspiracism from this president. But it’s rather easy to understand, and there’s an ever-present visual reminder that cannot be explained away.
You have the sudden DEFCON 1 imperative to fix the pool, demanded by a president focused on the wrong priorities. You have the Trumpian boasts that nobody had remedied this national disgrace in 100 years, but he alone could do so. You have the no-bid contracts for a total cost of over $16 million and counting, with more than twice the usual profit margin, for cleaning, filtration, and a layer of “American flag blue” paint on the bottom meant to ensure a consistent color. You have part of that, a $1.7 million no-bid contract, given to John J. Cafaro, a Trump donor, Mar-a-Lago neighbor, and understudy in a high school musical theater production of The Sopranos. You have the paint inevitably peeling off and the algae returning to its traditional perch, with Trump literally unable to drain the swamp. You have the president, manic about being defeated by microscopic aquatic organisms, claiming that dastardly Democratic vandals unloaded fertilizer into the pool and sliced up the paint, insisting that there’s visual evidence of this without releasing it, sending out law enforcement to arrest the perfidious saboteurs (one of them a three-time Olympian who was just an onlooker), and threatening lawsuits against the media for not reporting these facts.
Literally everything wrong with Trump 2.0 is revealed in this story. He’s fiddling with the bottom of the pool while Rome burns, while inflation rises and precarity builds. He’s paying off cronies with our money to make things worse. And he refuses to take responsibility for failure, instead blaming anyone and everyone else with a sea of lies.
Barack Obama’s administration did indeed spend twice as much to beautify the pool and faced the same result. But this project is now a symbol of Trump’s broken presidency. And once the public makes that connection, no amount of bluster will beat the charges. Trump’s toxic reputation is increasingly and perhaps permanently linked to a slimy green pool.
Oh well. At least there aren’t any rabbits roaming in it.
If there were a rabbit in Trump’s pool, it would have died from the highly toxic hydrogen peroxide that workers added to the pool to kill the algae.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
the Trump pool incident is only like the rabbit incident in that both were public. No one took the rabbit incident seriously any more than they took the flap over Obama using Dijon mustard on a hot dog seriously. The Trump pool is a different matter. A lot of money changed hands in this corrupt affair.
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Other highlights:
Obama wore a tan suit!
Michelle Obama wore a dress that showed her bare arms! But when Melania’s nude photos are shown, it’s no big deal!
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IS TRUMP AS SMART AS A FOURTH GRADER?
IN FOURTH GRADE SCIENCE, children learn that dark surfaces absorb a lot of heat. Any fourth grader could have told Trump that putting a dark coating on the bottom of a shallow pool would create the kind of warm water that algae loves. DUH.
The U.S. Park Service has filed a court document under oath that there were cuts BENEATH THE LINING of the pool that were done BEFORE THE LINING WAS APPLIED!!! The cuts were in the old foam between the expansion joints in the pool bottom; such cuts would have been a normal first step in removing the old foam before applying new foam — but somebody cut corners, probably thinking that no one would ever see they hadn’t replaced the old foam, and they just left the cut old foam in place and applied the new liner over it. Shoddy work. Criminal fraud.
DID YOU KNOW? TRUMP’S ARMORED CADILLAC SUV, which weighs almost 10 tons, drove him down the entire middle of the newly-coated Reflecting Pool on May 7, before the coating was dry and fully bonded to the pool. Trump’s motorcade included 9 more 10-ton armored SUVs, all driving on the newly-coated pool surface.
DUH — do ya think that driving a convoy of 10-ton vehicles all along the newly-painted surface of the pool had anything to do with the coating peeling off?
Click on the YouTube link below to see Trump’s pool parade for yourself.
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What a jerk!
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Trump’s Reflecting Pool disaster will come to be metaphor for all of his crude attempts to put his “Brand” on our Capital and his failure to “Drain the Swamp!”
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The Reflecting Pool is literally Trump’s Swamp.
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Driving on the reflecting pool??!!! Is that an actual thing, the words do not compute. Oh sure, don’t you know, people drive on their backyard pools all the time, they don’t get very far, but it’s an expression of pure Trumpism, so it’s all good. Instead of driving on the reflecting pool, couldn’t they have used drones to hover over the pool to do an inspection or have men/women in soft-soled shoes or slippers to inspect and repair the pool structure?
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