šæ š¦ āKill All the F*cking Algaeā: Trumpās Failed DC Pyongyang-ification Is Driving Him Insane
The president's sunken mind can't get out of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool he wants so badly to renovate ā unless it's time for him to make life miserable for Republicans on Capitol Hill.
On this day in 1876, Native Americans led by Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull wiped out U.S. forces under Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in southern Montana, the greatest Native American victory over the U.S. Army.
Happy Thursday, everybody. Itās Swin again. As weāve been reporting for months at Zeteo, Donald Trump and his Republican Party have been marshaling a gargantuan sum of YOUR money ā in the billions! ā for initiatives designed to feed his vanity and perpetuate his cult of personality. Itās one of the more disturbing aspects of an infernally authoritarian time, the kind of thing we lied about to ourselves for decades, insisting it canāt happen here. And yet the president and his gang of thieves and reprobates are so clumsy that itās hard not to laugh at them, even as they try to arrest you for laughing at them.
In todayās āFirst Draft,ā we dive back into Trump and the GOPās bungled Pyongyang-ification of our capital, and how it underscores the limits of his reign of terror. Plus, Trump stokes more Capitol Hill chaos, and he stokes a shouting match with a GOP senator, while shivving his own party over a bipartisan housing bill.
āHe Just Wants to Get Back to the Poolā¦ā
On the night of June 17, I made a joke on Bluesky that Donald Trump āneeds this war to endā so he ācan stop worrying about war on Iran and get back to his main priority of war on Reflecting Pool.ā Because the second Trump era defies all satire, an hour later, the Interior Department began comparing efforts to combat āthe dead algaeā plaguing the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool to Trumpās war on Iran.
The Reflecting Pool saga, now escalated to the White House imposing a mini-police-state around the pool while accused of killing ducks, is nothing if not emblematic of the Maddest-Emperor phase of Trumpās Mad Emperor presidency. He and several departments are siphoning a ton of public money, time, and resources into a vanity project. Now the project is over-budget and devolving into a mortifying self-inflicted spectacle, the president is having armed agents ā and literal U.S. troops ā patrol the area. Trump is bragging about how many people have been arrested or cited for disrespecting his pool, and much of the U.S. government is spreading Trumpās lie that āvandalsā caused the damage that his own ārenovationā has in fact wrought. The president is also threatening to sue media outlets that piss him off about the pool. And in keeping with the broader traditions of the Trump-Vance administration, they canāt even manage to pull off this small disaster without seeming suspiciously corrupt.
The Trump presidency is full of perfect metaphors for the depravity and self-defeating failures of the ruling partyās policies. For instance, Trumpās military birthday parade in DC last year was a visual representation of the blundering limitations of his fascist personality cult, and another sign that his administration canāt do anything big or small without doing it āillegally.ā Now Trumpās hyper-fixation on the reflecting pool ā including his expensive, boneheaded inability to fix it and his demands for a cover-up of yet another humiliation ā stands tall among painfully on-the-nose metaphors for the horror he and his party are causing and the wars theyāre losing.