Trump battles multiple bodies of water, loses, whines about it

If you haven't been following recent developments in our nation's ongoing "not a war" with Iran, we can bring you up to speed in just a few sentences. The Strait of Hormuz is not open, because Iran says it is closed until the U.S. is able to convince Israel to pull back from military operations in Lebanon. The U.S. blockade of Iranian ships is no longer in effect, because the "memorandum of understanding" called for its cessation. U.S. sanctions against Iran have been lifted for the same reason, though it is unclear whether all the other nations that have sanctioned Iran will be going along with that.

There's been no new progress on the fate of Iran's nuclear program, and Donald Trump is now openly defending Iran's missile program as necessary for its defense, despite the war's original supposed objective of destroying it.

So far, then, the Memorandum of Understanding appears to have been a thinly veiled excuse for Trump doing what he'd been itching to do since near the beginning of the war: give up and leave.

Trump gets to announce the end of military operations so that he can get back to the more important task of rebuilding Washington, D.C. in his image. Iran gets a 60-day lifting of sanctions, no restrictions on its missile program and network of violent regional proxies, and a now-proven power to turn international Persian Gulf shipping off and on purely on their own say-so.

We could have done all that at home, of course. There was nothing stopping Trump from shipping JD Vance or Marco Rubio off to Pakistan or Switzerland to ease Iranian sanctions and give them a permission slip for taxing Gulf shipping back in January, without any military involvement at all. It would have cost considerably less money, no deaths, and Iranian negotiators would likely have been so giddy that they'd have nominated Donald for a Nobel Peace Prize right then and there.

Notably, Trump's diplomats are not even attempting to press for any Iranian concession beyond those in the original, Obama-era JCPOA that Trump tore up. The U.S. team is offering up $300 billion-plus of frozen Iranian funds and new investments in a sweaty attempt to get, at most, a partial replacement of the original deal.

Art of the Deal, baby. Talk big, screw up in ways onlookers couldn't even fathom, pay off the damages with other people's money and it's back to Mar-a-Lago for another round of perpetual ass-kissing.

Donald Trump has a lot of nemeses, too many for anyone to list even if they had all the time in the world, really, but chief among them has to be "large bodies of water." The Strait of Hormuz isn't the first liquid calamity to foil his plans or earn his ire.

• He previously insisted that the Gulf of Mexico name itself the Gulf of America, and when the Gulf of Mexico didn't come through he launched a military campaign of drone strikes against random fishermen who dared to use it.

• One of the more memorable humiliations of his first term came when he held up a NOAA map of the gulf on which he had quite obviously altered the forecasted path of a hurricane with a black marker; that map was one of the items he hid away in Mar-a-Lago after his 2020 loss.

• The Potomac River was the target of similar Trump fabrications. The man went so far as to mount a monument on his Washington, D.C. golf course dubbing it "The River of Blood," a pointless slander meant to invoke fake Civil War battles but which was more likely Trump's retaliation after dunking too many golf balls.

• Trump also proposed diverting a hurricane's path by launching a nuclear strike against it, making him the only modern-day American president to contemplate a war against the Atlantic Ocean.

The smallest body of water to cause Trump trouble might be the Mar-a-Lago pool, a prominent spot for close friend Jeffrey Epstein to recruit underage girls for sex trafficking. Trump apparently was quite put out about that, too—but not about the sex trafficking, apparently, but of Epstein poaching "pool girls" that Trump found first. It's possible that Epstein and Trump would have remained friends for years, if it wasn't for that damn pool.

And then there's Trump's latest nemesis: The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.

For quite a while, Trump pretended to not know that things were going green after his much-boasted-of Reflecting Pool "renovations." It didn't come up. He had apparently inked a Memorandum of Understanding with the pool and wandered off again.

It wasn't just an algae bloom. If it were just an algae bloom, it could be written off as an act of God, or a new form of biblical plague—one that happened to be far more localized than the usual biblical plagues, and in fact which confined itself entirely to just this one rectangle. But the "American flag blue" pool liner that Trump had ordered be painted onto the granite basin also began to peel, possibly because reasons, and at that point it was going to be difficult for Donald to dodge weighing in on the troubles.

The thing of it is, neither of these are crises. Neither of these things are typically the stuff of presidential scandal, had not the antichrist himself personally boasted on television, repeatedly, that these were problems that would never happen under him because he was just too damn smart.

Other presidents were stupid, that's why algae grew in their reflecting pools. Other presidents didn't know how to do real estate, that's why they put up with a granite-bottomed pool rather than spraying the whole thing with a thick sturdy coating of commercial-grade class. He could have—and here we come to the defining feature of Donald Trump—simply not said anything at all, and nobody would forever associate him with the Mountain Dew Extreme Taste The Algae Blister Pool.

All he had to do was shut up, but no. No, he had to make the maintenance of every Washington, D.C. landmark a referendum on his own supposed omnipotence, and here we are.

As anyone who is even passingly familiar with "outdoors" can tell you, there's nothing particularly surprising about an algae bloom in a newly-filled pond. This is what happens. If anything it should be counted as a minor miracle if it doesn't happen, because whether you're filling a pool with river water or treated city water, it's going to have things like phosphates in it and algae, quite literally, lives for that stuff. Even if the water's sterile, the rocks are sterile, everything is sterile, it's not sterile the first time a bird lands in it.

At that point, we're off to the races. Algae and anything else that drifts in will grow until it's exhausted every bit of nutrients, and then it will die, and then the nutrients will be released and the cycle will continue.

There are really only two ways to keep an outdoor pond clean. You either keep it filled with enough poison to kill whatever tries to grow (swimming pools!) or you filter out the nutrients so aggressively that not even bacteria can take hold. We can hope that Trump can be talked out of dumping chlorine into this thing and turning it the surface into a floating parade of wildlife carcasses, so that just leaves the filtering. It's hard to cycle 6.5 million gallons of water with 300,000 square feet of air exposure using any sort of pipes-and-pumps system, which is why the Reflecting Pool continued to have algae blooms after prior renovations.

So now they're trying ozone bubblers in the pool, too. Ozone kills bacteria quite effectively! But it doesn't filter the nutrients, so all 6.5 million gallons will have to be ozonated all the time.

Likewise, it is not terribly surprising that rolling out over a quarter million square feet of epoxy-based sealant will not go perfectly according to plan.

Maybe some of the granite lining wasn't perfectly cleaned before rolling down the epoxy. Maybe some of it was still damp. There were spots where the lining didn't adhere, which is something that will happen even in spots on your fancy garage floor if the installers are a bit sloppy, and nobody would be that surprised to see similar failures here and there after laying down nearly seven whole acres of the stuff.

Unless, of course, you just spent the last month bragging incessantly about how stuff like that only happens to stupid people. Then people are going to point and laugh, and why shouldn't they? You just proved yourself the biggest rube of all.

And maybe you've filled the pool back up a bit sooner than you should have, because you're a big special birthday boy who wants to be able to brag about it in time for his birthday. And maybe after an algae bloom turned American Flag Blue into Baby Puke Green, you hired a crew to come in and manually scrub the whole bottom of the pool, and maybe it's a tough job and they're putting their shoulders into it.

Or maybe nobody gave all that much of a shit to begin with because it was a no-bid contract doled out as a personal favor, which isn't a situation in which "due diligence" often comes up.

So all of this would be only mildly embarrassing, had Donald J. Trump not intentionally staked his whole reputation on none of these things happening while engaging in greasy bragging about how he was the first president in history smart enough to know how to avoid them. But what's done is done, and now our long national nightmare turned into a person has to come up with a reason for the failure.

Curse you, photosynthesis! Have at you, fluid dynamics! Eat shit, polymer science!

Except our big decaying leader doesn't know any of those words, so instead he goes with what he always goes with, every single time anything doesn't go 100% his way, because he is a malignant narcissist who believes even natural phenomena must bow to his own wheezing edicts.

It's always a conspiracy. It's always somebody else's fault. It's always the fault of his enemies, whoever they might be, wherever they might be.

The algae is not blooming of natural causes. The algae is blooming because his enemies Did A Conspiracy.

The epoxy coating is not failing. His enemies "went in there with a knife."

The implications here are especially severe, because back in May he channeled the builders of the Titanic to boast that his new coating would be indestructible. It would, quite specifically, be knife-proof!

Not only has the epoxy not failed, then, but his enemies have deployed a new, heretofore secret type of knife that is more powerful than previous known knives. And they made a cut that was 250 feet, no I mean 300 feet, no I mean 350 feet long but which nobody but Donald Trump can see; to the rest of us, it just look like blistering paint.

Again, this is Donald Trump's only move when confronted, and it keeps happening because the man has a mental illness that ought to preclude him from being anywhere near a nuclear button. When Donald wanted a Nobel Prize but didn't get one, he claimed it was a conspiracy by the Norwegians. When his show didn't win an Emmy, it was because his enemies had conspired to prevent it. When one of his business failures makes the news, it is a conspiracy by the media to make him look bad. Over and over and over.

Trump should be taken seriously, when he insists that a cabal of enemies is responsible for algae growing in his pool! We should absolutely be listening, when he claims that invisible opponents are shanking his pool liner! These are the ravings of a deranged man who seriously, sincerely believes that he is too brilliant to ever encounter failure but who is the constant target of secret, massive conspiracies to make it look like he has.

So now the National Guard has been summoned to guard a pond. The official United States government position is that the conspiracy against the pond is real. Homeland Security has been dispatched. Mounted police have been deployed. US Attorney and boxed wine enthusiast Jeanine Pirro says the conspirators will be "fully prosecuted."

Arrests have been made. Those who touch the water are ticketed; those who molest the peeling coating, or are suspected of doing so, are detained.

That's right. Rather than admitting that the sitting president is dangerously mentally ill in a way that materially affects his judgment even when contemplating questions like "why is there algae here" or "could this material have failed," the very top levels of the federal government are now scurrying to pretend they're hunting culprits who exist only in this one addled man's decaying mind.

Trump cannot fail; he can only drift farther into fascism as he seeks retribution against anyone who might think he has. And it's the most trouble a pool has caused Trump since the Jeffrey Epstein days, and it's coming close to breaking the man outright.

We could be done with this, you know. We could just all decide, as a nation, that we'd like to go back to the olden days when national leaders had to have at least a little more dignity than this. It's one thing to be stumped by pool renovations. It's entirely another to declare war on the pool, get your ass kicked on world television, and pretend that it only happened because your enemies conspired against you.