The more Donald Trump made the Reflecting Pool renovation project one of his top priorities, the more humiliating it was when he and his team failed spectacularly to deliver the promised results. Instead of demonstrating the superiority of his approach to problem-solving, the president offered timely evidence that his model — rooted in cutting corners, controversial contracts, rushed timelines, etc. — simply doesn’t work.
But instead of moving on from the endeavor, Trump made matters vastly worse. A devastating New York Times report last week explained that the project “became a striking reflection instead of the second Trump administration’s willingness to skirt laws, expend millions of dollars, ignore facts and punish truth tellers in service of the president’s demands to put his mark on the capital.”
The reporting dovetailed with a Washington Post editorial that summarized that the Reflecting Pool debacle “was a silly summer story that should have been a relatively minor political embarrassment. … Instead, the administration turned it into an appalling abuse of prosecutorial power.”
The fiasco took a radical turn in June when the president began assuring the public that he’d actually succeeded beautifully, until “vandals” intervened and ruined his triumph. It was these villainous rascals, he insisted, who deserved the blame for his failure. The Republican further insisted that everyone play along with this alternative explanation, despite the inconvenient fact that the “vandals” didn’t appear to exist in reality.
For his part, Trump didn’t just blame these nefarious criminals, he also repeatedly claimed to have proof. “We have photographs or tapes, like moving cameras” that show people “cutting it with a box knife,” he told reporters last week, adding, “There was vandalism.”
The president made related comments throughout the summer, repeatedly claiming that there was unambiguous evidence, which he refused to share, which bolstered his odd claims. It’s precisely why, when U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro dropped all the charges against accused vandals, Trump was outraged — since it meant the former Fox News host was choosing to ignore the evidence that he believed existed.
On Sunday afternoon, however, he changed his tune, publishing a new and unexpected item to his social media platform. After pointing to an alleged witness who accused former Olympian David Hearn, Trump wrote:
There was substantial other damage to the Reflecting Pool, also but, unfortunately, there is no video or proof, other than the damage, itself. … Security cameras have been, and are being, installed. Thank you for your attention to this matter!
As part of the same missive, the president acknowledged “some contractor error,” though he added that “it was a very small area of this massive Pool, and was relatively inconsequential.”
Despite these acknowledgements, Trump apparently wants prosecutors to move forward with criminal cases anyway. In fact, on Friday afternoon, the Republican published a separate online item in which he called on Pirro to “revisit” the case against Hearn, complaining about his support for Democrats and his defense attorney.
In other words, the president seems to understand that the U.S. attorney’s office doesn’t have the evidence it needs to bring a case to court, but he also seems to want a case to proceed, at least in part because he doesn’t like some random American citizen’s political views and choice of lawyers.
Clearly, it was in Trump’s interest to walk away from this mess months ago and hope that the public didn’t notice. He instead decided to dig a political ditch, fall into it, and keep digging.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.
The post Trump acknowledges lack of ‘proof’ as his Reflecting Pool claims unravel appeared first on MS NOW.
