Trump Is Drowning Us All in His Green Slime Crisis

Trumpland admin June 24, 2026 0 Comments

Trump Is Drowning Us All in His Green Slime Crisis

Kermit the Frog said it best: It’s not easy being green. And now the Reflecting Pool, sickly green with algae, is D.C.’s top tourist attraction, a metaphor for what Trump has done to curdle his presidency. Another top stop for gawkers is the tarps hanging at the Kennedy Center, a cover-up in plain sight ostensibly in place to obscure possible damage done to the marble when Trump’s name was yanked off—and, deep down, to protect Trump’s fragile ego from public scrutiny.

Trump’s handling of the mess made at both landmarks is typical for him: deflect blame and hide the truth. In the case of the Reflecting Pool, he’s alleged that the debacle is largely thanks to anti-government vandals, suggesting without evidence that someone(s) with a knife or a boxcutter slit the recently-installed blue rubber sheath from the bottom of one end of the historic water feature to the other, 350 feet in all, upending a nearly $15 million upgrade that Trump boasted would last fifty, maybe a hundred years.

Questioned how anyone could pull off such a crime amid the continued presence of National Guard troops, not to mention all those tourists and their cameras, Trump said simply that, “I saw it.” (A New York Times account has challenged Trump’s assertion that the damage was manmade, but rather nature asserting itself.)

The president told reporters that they would see this evidence in court, where his handpicked U.S. Attorney, Judge Pirro, was threatening ten-year-long sentences to anyone who dared to even touch the pool’s water.

(Spoiler alert: we will never see those pictures of the so-called slit. They do not exist any more than the “evidence” Trump said he had gathered about Barack Obama’s birth certificate, or the “evidence” that shows he won the 2020 election “by a lot.”)

Late Tuesday afternoon, workers could be seen hauling in fencing to put up around the area, with the Pool reportedly even listed on Google Maps as “temporarily closed.” More National Guard and U.S. Marshals are expected to patrol the site in the coming days as though the area is under serious threat. It sure looks like Trump is spoiling for a confrontation of some kind where he can flex those authoritarian muscles.

Meanwhile, a taunting slogan has emerged on social media: “More people were arrested at the Reflecting Pool than in the Epstein files.”

Compared to the myriad other problems facing the country, pool liners and algae blooms are no big deal. But there’s a pattern here, Michael Sozan, a senior fellow for democracy policy at the Center for American Progress, told the Daily Beast. “This is how authoritarians try to alter reality. They put the focus on a trivial but symbolic problem,” Sozan explained. “They make it worse through their own incompetence or corruption. They waste taxpayer resources while enriching themselves or their allies. They try to shift the resulting blame to an imaginary enemy.”

Taking a step back for the big picture, Sozan added: “He’s arresting people who touched the Reflecting Pool but pardoning people who almost beat Capitol Police officers to death.”

Trump is a master of deflection, and while he should be getting hammered for making a bad deal with Iran, we’re more focused on watching a dead duckling get scooped up from the algae and rolling our eyes at park employees dumping peroxide into the water in a desperate attempt to purge the algae.

The Reflecting Pool rose to the top of Trump’s concerns in late April after a visitor to the Oval Office reportedly told him the pool was “filthy, dirty,” the water “disgusting-looking” and “not representative” of America’s majesty. Can’t have that! Trump soon made a trip to the area, Secret Service in tow, to see for himself, and with the assistance of Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, set in motion the no-bid contracts for the botched renovations that have now become the center of the storm.

Under the guise of an emergency, and citing the country’s 250^th birthday festivities, Trump hired a company owned by J.J. Cafaro, a Florida friend, GOP donor and two-time felon, to install a water purification system in the Reflecting Pool that was supposed to get rid of the algae. The company, Greenwater Services, had a no-bid contract for $1.8 million, and—cue the laugh track—it certainly lived up to its name.

Another $14.7 million no-bid contract was awarded to a Virginia firm, Atlantic Industrial Coatings, to spread the blue waterproofing material on the pool’s concrete floor, which, in a matter of days, was coming apart and floating to the surface.

That was when David Hearn, 67, a former Olympian, stopped in the middle of a 52-mile bicycle ride to check out the Tidal Basin. He was arrested for touching a piece of the blue rubbery material and held for several hours, he claims, without being allowed to make a phone call or being read his Miranda rights.

Hearn is now being represented by former White House counsel Norm Eisen, who says, “It is not a crime to touch water.” Eisen touts the recent victory in federal court to free the Kennedy Center from Trump’s grip, together with a judicial ruling that quashed Trump’s so-called slush fund to reward Jan 6 conspirators, as reason to believe our court system can withstand Trump’s authoritarian moves.

Atlantic Industrial Coatings, no doubt embarrassed by the publicity, has agreed to drain the pool and fix the problem under warranty. The work won’t be completed by the July Fourth festivities. But maybe it’s a fitting coda for a celebration that fits the world we’re in. Bring on the fireworks and the patriotic music, but leave room for some healthy cynicism (if not a toast) for what some are calling, wait for it, “The Strait of Warm Ooze.”