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President Trump spent the weekend trying to calm the waters in Washington and roil them in the Persian Gulf.
Let’s begin with the less serious of these two self-inflicted crises. This spring, Trump for some reason became fixated on the Reflecting Pool on the National Mall, which had not previously been a topic of national discussion, but which he believes should vibrate with a deep Technicolor blue. The administration awarded no-bid contracts for both a color coating and a new water-purification system, with the latter going to a company tied to a Trump-campaign donor previously convicted of conspiracy to bribe. Surprising no one, both parts of the project have been a disaster. As my colleague Matt Viser has vividly reported, the pool is beset with algae, and the blue coating is coming off in big chunks.
Now Trump says water will likely have to be removed from the pool to do “necessary repairs”—in other words, $16.4 million in taxpayer money will go down the drain. (Credit where it’s due, though: This may become the first time Trump will have actually drained a swamp.) He also blamed vandals for the issues, though the White House has offered no evidence to suggest that’s true. Visitors who approached the pool this weekend were shooed away by National Guard members, and at least one who touched the pool’s broken liner was arrested; he denies doing any damage. Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney for Washington, promised to throw the book at vandals, which mostly seems like a good way for her to extend her record of failing to get D.C. grand juries to green-light tenuous prosecutions.
Meanwhile, Trump nearly upended peace negotiations between Vice President Vance and Iranian leaders in Switzerland. Over the weekend, Iran claimed it had once more blocked the Strait of Hormuz because of fighting between Israel and Hezbollah, which appears to violate the fragile cease-fire in place. Whether the strait is actually closed is not entirely clear: The Trump administration says traffic is flowing, but third-party analysts say traffic has slowed, though not totally stopped, and remains well below prewar levels. Over the weekend, Trump told the Fox News reporter Trey Yingst that he had told Iranian officials, “You close it and you won’t have a country,” adding, “You won’t even make it back to your fucking country.” On Truth Social, he said that if Iran didn’t rein in Hezbollah, he would “hit Iran very hard again, just like we did last week, only harder!!!”
Threatening to kill interlocutors in the middle of a peace negotiation is generally seen as uncouth, in addition to counterproductive. Today, Vance was left to tell the Iranians that, in essence, they should just write off his threats as bluster: “What we told the Iranians yesterday is that when you guys engage in what us Millennials might call trash talk, you can’t expect the president of the United States not to respond and not to correct the record.”
Like Trump’s repeated blaming of vandals for damaging the pool, Trump is talking, but no one’s really paying much attention. Iran seems to have already concluded that it doesn’t need to take Trump seriously, which is a mixed blessing: good because it meant the Iranians didn’t quit the negotiations, but bad for the prospects of the U.S. reaching a favorable deal.
The Iran war and the Reflecting Pool, though very different in scale and importance, share some illuminating parallels. In both cases, Trump embarked on a project while blaming the Obama administration, his persistent bugbear, for an alleged problem: Iranian aggression or an insufficiently azure pool. In both cases, he charged forward without a fleshed-out plan, preferring to fly by the seat of his pants, and ignored the experts who warned of exactly the problems that resulted—algal blooms, a blocked strait.
These are familiar patterns for Trump. What sets Iran and the Reflecting Pool apart from some previous cases is that he has been unable to deny reality. In the past, Trump has spun setbacks as victories, lying prodigiously to do so. In the case of his bogus claim of a stolen 2020 election, for example, he has relied on generalized public distrust of institutions, robust conservative media, and the arcana of election procedure to help create at least some doubt.
But no one can deny that the Reflecting Pool is, in fact, currently green. Nor can Trump spin the war in Iran—not when Americans spent weeks filling up their cars with gas that spiked well above $4 a gallon, and not when ships are visibly bottled up in the strait. These failures are plain in a way that exceeds even Trump’s capacity to get his supporters to believe him over their own eyes. A new CBS News/YouGov poll finds that just 39 percent of Republicans believe the U.S. got the better end of the peace agreement. Only 22 percent of Americans overall think so.
Now Trump’s only recourse is trying again, almost certainly with worse results. Vance is celebrating a tentative agreement to merely restore nuclear inspections—a safeguard present in Obama’s hated deal with Iran—even as the U.S. makes concessions such as allowing Iran to sell more oil. Trump badly wants the Reflecting Pool fixed by July 4, but it’s unclear if that is possible; if it is, doing so will almost certainly cost millions more in taxpayer money. The president chose two unnecessary battles and lost them both, and the American people will pay.
Related:
Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
- Keir Starmer: the man who couldn’t do it
- The election system wasn’t built for this.
- Science has a name for what’s plaguing the Reflecting Pool.
Today’s News
- Keir Starmer announced that he will resign as prime minister of the United Kingdom; he is expected to be succeeded by Andy Burnham, the former mayor of Greater Manchester.
- The Trump administration temporarily eased decades-long oil sanctions against Iran, as the U.S. and Iran continue to hold peace talks in Switzerland.
- A federal judge blocked the Trump administration from using Social Security data to flag noncitizens for expulsion from voter rolls, ruling that the administration had violated federal protections.
Dispatches
- The Wonder Reader: Adventure may have less to do with where you go than with your willingness to leave the familiar behind, Rafaela Jinich writes.
Explore all of our newsletters here.
Evening Read
Paradise Revisited
By Helen Lewis
My first encounter with a Galápagos tortoise came when the driver of my taxi from the airport attempted a risky overtaking maneuver into the path of an oncoming bus. On the island of Santa Cruz, which is bisected by a single highway, this is a favorite sport: The white Toyota HiLuxes that serve as taxis overtake tour buses, while tour buses overtake trucks. But this time, the driver quickly pulled back behind the slow-moving car ahead of us. “Tortoise,” she explained.
And there it was—a great dome, an overturned bathtub, trying to cross the road. What set of circumstances favored an animal that weighs up to 600 pounds, moves at four miles a day, and takes a quarter of a century to reach sexual maturity? The answer is: a remote island chain formed by volcanoes, with little fresh water and no predators, where life moved at a languid, lumbering pace—at least, until humans appeared.
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Culture Break
Take a look. This is California, as seen through the lens of George Rose, a Getty photographer and a Golden State native.
To date or not to date. Newsletters are the hot new place for singles—and their writers are playing cupid with their like-minded readers, Anna Holmes explains.
PS
One of my favorite musical stories in the past few years has been the emergence of Marshall Allen. An alto saxophonist, Allen was long known among jazz aficionados for his work playing in the Sun Ra Arkestra, and later leading the band after its eponym’s death. Last year, however, he released his first solo record—just a few months before his 101st birthday, a Guinness World Record for oldest debut release. Since then, he’s kept busy, playing music far more adventurous than most musicians half, a third, or a quarter of his age can muster. I’ve seen Allen a handful of times since he was a youngster of just 91, and I’ve left astonished every time. Allen is one of the artists playing at the 30th annual Vision Festival, a smorgasbord of exceptional improvised music and arts this week in New York (and available streaming for those of us who are elsewhere).
— David
Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.
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The post Trump Can’t Spin His Way Out of His Two Latest Crises appeared first on The Atlantic.
