The Reflecting Pool Has Driven the President Insane

The master of the attention economy is drawing the world's attention to a story that makes him look pathetic.

Imagine that President Trump pooped his pants, right there in the Oval Office. Then imagine that rather than simply not talking about it and moving on — it’s pretty embarrassing, after all — he sent out a series of angry late-night Truth Social posts about how not only didn’t he poop his pants but actually delivered into his pants a serving of the finest beluga caviar, and no one has ever seen pants so delicious. Then imagine that in the face of incontrovertible evidence that he did in fact poop his pants, he kept talking about the pants-pooping, moving on to spin a deranged theory claiming that a dark conspiracy of leftists had snuck into the White House and planted the poop right there in his pants.

That’s roughly what’s happening right now with the Reflecting Pool.

In other words, the president of the United States, not only the most powerful person on Earth at the moment but someone convinced he is the most powerful human to have ever lived (more on that later) is currently having a nervous breakdown over the status of the Reflecting Pool. The undisputed master of the politics of attention is working tirelessly to direct everyone’s attention to one of his administration’s less consequential but more comical screwups.

From idiot savant to plain old idiot

Over the course of his 2016 campaign, it became clear that though Trump was ignorant and foolish in a great many ways, he was a kind of political idiot savant. He understood the anger, hatred and resentment of the Republican base that his primary opponents either didn’t grasp or were unwilling to fully accept. He had a genius for capturing attention, through outrageousness, the relentless promotion of conflict, and a communication strategy his adviser Steve Bannon memorably described as “flood[ing] the zone with shit.” He forged an unusually strong bond with a portion of that GOP base, a bond that could survive almost anything.

Over the next decade Trump would have plenty of failures, but his successes — especially capturing the White House twice — would lead many to conclude that the savant part far outweighed the idiot part. As Maggie Haberman, co-author of the buzzy new book Regime Change said on Monday, Trump’s aides “believe there is something almost mystical about him, that he can hear frequencies that maybe they can’t.”

I read the book in order to write an article about it for MS NOW, and one of the things that comes through is how tightly self-reinforcing Trump’s bubble is: Everyone knows that he must be praised constantly and never contradicted, and Trump, receiving all that praise and affirmation, becomes more and more convinced of his own infallibility. Yet the more convinced he is that he’s a god, the more reinforcement he requires. So at a moment like this, apparently no one has the courage to say to him “Sir, will you please, please stop talking about the freaking Reflecting Pool?”

It could have been a one-day story, something libs laughed about on Bluesky but almost no one in the rest of the country heard anything about. If he got asked by a reporter, he could have said, “There were some problems, but we’re getting it fixed. Happens sometimes. It’s going to be beautiful when it’s finished.” And that would have been that.

Instead, Trump rocketed the story to the top of the news agenda. And in typical style, he has concocted a conspiracy to blame it on. Was it shoddy work from the no-bid contractors who got the job because of their connections to him? Of course not! It must have been leftists with knives, slashing the supposedly impenetrable rubber coating! Vandals!

As Trump lies go, this is a particularly pathetic one, especially since the Reflecting Pool is under constant surveillance from cameras, law enforcement, and tourists, any hour of the day or night.

And yet, news organizations still can’t quite figure out how to call a lie a lie:

When I was a young grad student, I was on a research team performing a content analysis of campaign rhetoric, coding hundreds of news stories for various kinds of statements. We had a category of one candidate lying about their opponent that we called “negative assertion without evidence.” It was such a silly euphemism that it became an inside joke — “I think Steve is hung over today”; “Oo, negative assertion without evidence!” But sadly, that’s the best thing news organizations have come up with to describe Trump’s absurd lie about the knife-wielding vandal commando squads that attacked the Reflecting Pool in his fantasy.

Respect mah authoritah!

I promised more on how Trump now believes he is the most powerful human to ever live, so here’s an excerpt from Regime Change:

Trump gestured for Harp to bring us copies of the two-page document. He began reading from it, reciting the names of some of history’s most powerful figures, explaining how each fell short of his own power as U.S. President. Alexander the Great, the Caesars, William the Conqueror—“They didn’t have airplanes, right? You couldn’t travel around.” Genghis Khan. Attila the Hun. Tamerlane. “Napoleon,” he said with relish. “Hitler. Mao. Stalin.”

These leaders “maintained power through fear,” he said. “Who would ever do a thing like that? Right?”

Trump lingered on the document’s central argument: that each leader, however fearsome in his day, had no global reach. Their power was local. But his was not.

“I never thought of it in terms of that,” Trump said. “It’s very interesting, the power.” Then he added: “But when I read it, I said, ‘He’s right.’”

Harp gave copies to each of us, and Trump rolled on.

The document’s opening line was the mesmerized citation of an acolyte: “Donald Trump is, without question, the most powerful man that the planet has ever known—by a long way.” It went on over the two pages. Genghis Khan and Attila the Hun were “butchers” and “terrorists—and more like the Taliban than people with real power.” It concluded with a flourish on William the Conqueror, who had come up in a conversation between Trump and the author during a round of golf: “If President Trump is the American Eagle, then William the Conqueror was merely a sparrow.”

“You can’t talk about your power,” Trump told us. “Oh, I’m so powerful. You can’t do that. Doesn’t come off well.” He was content to let someone else make the case on his behalf, and he wanted to make sure we left with a copy.

Later, Harp would text us the author’s name. He was not actually a historian, but rather had been Gary Player’s caddy and personal confidant for decades.

I love the fact that Trump still wants elite validation — it has to be a historian who makes this judgment, even if the “historian” is actually a caddy.

But what’s striking is that he believes he’s the most powerful person in history, yet he’s spending his days trying to convince people that his incompetent contractors didn’t screw up the reflecting pool. His ambitions are vast, yet his focus couldn’t be more petty. He bestrides the globe and history like a colossus, yet he is defeated by a crappy paint job. It’s clearly driving him mad.

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