You may have seen the news by now that the Trump White House has asked the Justice Department to consider bringing a new prosecution against the same man that the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Washington, D.C. just moved to dismiss felony charges against over the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool saga.
Donald Trump showed up at a Las Vegas rally on Wednesday night singing the same out-of-tune song he has belched out ever since he got his revenge over the Democrats in 2024 and clawed his way back into the White House. During that time, he has waged illegal wars, killed innocent people and committed war crimes against enemies real and imagined.
Since his return Trump has consistently alienated and enraged U.S. allies while going out of his way to coddle and occasionally enrage nations more often viewed as enemies. Except for Iran, of course, which he alternately bombs, demonizes and flatters. He invaded Venezuela to serve a warrant. He has ordered missile attacks on boats at sea without cause, evidence or due process. Hey, the crews have to stay sharp, right?
Here at home, Trump has destroyed the East Wing, the South Lawn, the Kennedy Center and the Rose Garden, while crowding the city with young National Guard troops who have little or no desire to be there. Trump doesn’t care. Those men and women in uniform are just props used to exercise control so he can crow about how safe the city is. If he decides to call for martial law, he’ll conveniently already have boots on the ground in D.C.
While preparing for the country’s planned celebration of its 250th birthday, Trump decided to do a little housecleaning and update the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, vowing to make it better than ever. As usual with this guy, we got a lot less than he promised, though he continues to tell us how “big and beautiful” the pool is — or rather was, until “vandals” destroyed it.
He issued a no-bid contract to a company that botched the renovation, according to staunch Trump loyalist Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C. That revelation came out only after former Olympic canoeist Jeff Hearn got hit with a felony charge, apparently for picking up a piece of the pool’s peeling paint from the renovation.
Immediately after his arrest, Pirro and Trump claimed they had definitive proof Hearn had caused more than $1,000 in damage. He was then indicted. Only after that did Pirro bother to review the evidence and conclude the renovation was at fault.
(Pete Kiehart for The Washington Post via Getty Images) A piece of blue coating, still attached to the bottom, bobs in the water at the Reflecting Pool on June 21, 2026.
Wake up, kids: I’ve seen this behavior before.
When I was just a little boy, standing to my daddy’s knee, my pop took me to visit my Aunt Bill and Uncle Beverly on their farm outside Bardstown, Kentucky.
Yes, Aunt Bill and Uncle Beverly. I thought they’d gotten named backward when I first met them. They were great people and it was a great place to live. Their farmhouse was already old when I first saw it in 1966, complete with a chicken coop out back.
It also featured what we’d now call a “vintage” kitchen, featuring antique appliances. The end of the Great Depression was just 25 years in our rearview mirror, but the stains were still easily seen throughout rural Kentucky.
A few minutes after I met Aunt Bill for the first time, she said something that struck me funny. I may have heard this expression before, but to this day, I hear Aunt Bill’s voice in my head saying, “Honey, quit running around like a chicken with its head cut off.” I heard that as I fled a pursuing bumblebee, with an emphasis on “quit” that sounded like a meat cleaver going through a chicken’s neck.
I laughed trying to visualize what she said. The only thing I could think of was a Bugs Bunny cartoon. My parents assured me that Aunt Bill’s description was every bit as accurate as she was colorful. I refused to believe them, and must have been strident enough that my aunt asked my mom if she’d allow me to witness her prepare the chicken casserole she planned to serve that night. I was a bit suspicious of the use of the word “witness” instead of the more familiar “watch.”
Our Summer sale is on!
What was this all about? I soon found out. My aunt took me out to the chicken coop and demonstrated, with a large cleaver, not only the origination of the saying but how one “prepared” an appropriately sized hen for the family dinner.
What I felt in that moment is exactly how I feel about American politics in 2026.You could make the argument that most of what passes for culture on this planet resembles a headless chicken spewing blood everywhere as it stumbles around aimlessly for a few minutes before falling over dead and becoming food for something else.
On the surface, things seem deceptively quiet, even normal, if you ignore the mass shootings, the war, the cyclosporiasis, the Trump “sports curse” and the hole that used to be the East Wing. Congress still meets. The president does whatever the hell he does. The Supreme Court hears cases. Wall Street keeps moving upward. Large media companies produce endless amounts of entertainment and news.
But look below the surface and you see a Supreme Court bought and sold to a cause that isn’t the Constitution. You see unending greed. Congress is paralyzed, brain-dead and greedy, a political zombie.
Just consider Robert F. Kennedy Jr. And his brain worm.
The HHS secretary recently and proudly told a reporter he had no gag reflex. While that may explain his affiliation with Trump, Kennedy also said he could literally pick up anything dead along the side of the road and eat it.
On the surface, things in America seem deceptively quiet, even normal. If you ignore the mass shootings, the war, the cyclosporiasis, the Trump “sports curse” and the hole that used to be the East Wing.
Once again, I have to circle around to the movie “Idiocracy.” I have previously compared Trump’s administration to the fictional world of that movie, while noting that it wasn’t supposed to be a documentary. In fact, I’ve made a huge error. The world “Idiocracy” is much less stupid than our reality. Remember that this president suggested treating COVID by injecting bleach. His two terms as president will likely serve as textbook examples of extreme government corruption. His name is destined to become a rude punchline or be completely forgotten. Either will do.
If there are still ratings to be gained from reporting on his nonsense, the corporate media will continuously keep doing that until a more profitable scandal comes along.
Still, I must insist that the existential angst of the United States is much larger than Donald Trump, though we apparently love hearing about him. So does he, I assure you. Cheer him, mock him or despise him; he’ll be here all week, so try the veal. He thrives on the attention.
Unless the Democrats win decisive control of both the House and the Senate this fall, or miraculously find a boatload of Trump supporters to vote for impeachment and convict him — and both seem unlikely — Trump will be president until he dies or his term ends. In both cases, we can’t be sure he won’t stick around. If Mitch McConnell can disappear for weeks and still hold office, there’s nothing keeping Trump from doing the same.
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Are we Rome after the empire has fallen? Would we even know it if we were? Many Romans didn’t know that at first. Will it take years to recognize our current situation for what it really is?
We have a president who does commercial breaks in his own public speeches for corporations that make him money. He loves insider trading, and engages in it based on decisions he makes as president. He should really be wearing a NASCAR jumpsuit with his corporate sponsors displayed on his back and sleeves. Make it brilliant white, with gold piping and epaulets, and I guarantee he’d wear it.
There are no principles in this administration beyond the principle of making money. There are no values that can’t be counted in dollars. If you don’t like it, you get to meet the muscle. At least until we run out of bullets, or Pete Hegseth quits staring at himself longingly in his full-length mirror.
There are no principles in this administration beyond the principle of making money. There are no values that can’t be counted in dollars. If you don’t like it, you get to meet the muscle.
Just as the Reflecting Pool debacle exposes Trump, it also exposes the real existential threat to America. We have abandoned many of the ideals that founded the country. We exercise no caution. We don’t respect our institutions, even the good ones. Many ignore the Constitution. Some want to gut it. Some openly embrace bigotry, deny science, despise free enterprise and hate the contributions made by immigrants — one of the coolest aspects of our national narrative.
We have literally and metaphorically tried to erase our actual history in favor of a mythical past that never existed — even in bad LSD trips.
What we’re left with is an intolerant society where might makes right, the ends justify the means and Anthony Fauci is thought to be guilty of corruption, greed and crimes against humanity, with no more evidence than was presented in the Reflecting Pool case.
That case has a singular importance because it displays Trump’s heartless and vindictive nature over the smallest issues. Indict before you investigate. Threaten the world, including your own U.S. attorney when the corruption is exposed. Rinse and repeat. Keep lying about everything.
There’s no case against the canoeist. There’s no case against Fauci. We can’t trust Trump on anything. He runs around like a chicken with his head cut off, trying to avoid questions about Jeffrey Epstein, his long list of no-bid contracts, and a wealth of other misdeeds. The press and the public also have that headless-chicken quality, running about reporting and consuming the latest outrages, while missing the larger point: Our government doesn’t work when we are at cross purposes. Of course being headless chickens we can’t think much.
In other words, we cannot deal with the problems we face if we can’t face the fact that we have created most of our problems. Until we do that, all I see is my Aunt Bill “preparing” the chicken for dinner. And we’re the chicken.
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from Brian Karem on the madness of the Trump era
The post Reflecting on Trump’s bottomless pool of corruption appeared first on Salon.com.
Donald Trump hates embarrassing failures even when they are, ultimately, his own fault. So when the sealant on his $13.1 million-turned-$16-million Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool renovation started peeling off in sheets days after the pool reopened and the water turned green with algae, he couldn’t simply say that a rushed, no-bid contract handed to his golfing buddy’s company produced shoddy work. Instead he demanded a villain, and the weaponized Justice Department complied.
On July 2, 2026, U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro held a triumphant press briefing to announce a felony indictment against former Olympic canoeist David Hearn. Pirro claimed her office possessed solid evidence of guilt proving beyond a reasonable doubt that the 67-year-old had committed a deliberate, forceful and violent act causing over $1,000 in damage to the pool liner when he stopped his bike in June, reached down and touched a loose piece of lining that had already come apart before he ever laid a hand on it. When pressed by journalists like NBC’s Ryan Reilly about photographic evidence showing the liner was already peeling long before Hearn ever stepped near the water, Pirro grew combative, waving off the question with the same on-air contempt she perfected across 14 years as a host at Fox News, and insisted her office would prove the damage in court with expert testimony.
Weeks later, the Justice Department acknowledged something dramatically different.
By late July, as Hearn’s defense counsel moved for release of the grand jury transcripts to expose glaring prosecutorial irregularities, Pirro’s case collapsed. Facing the real possibility of judicial sanctions, an inspector general investigation and disbarment, her office filed a 20-page motion to dismiss the indictment. The filing threw the Interior Department under the bus, claiming Secretary Doug Burgum’s agency had withheld 695 megabytes of crucial documents revealing the damage was caused by contractor error during the rush to finish before the America 250 Independence Day festivities. The department’s own records described repeated installation failures and extensive peeling of the pool liner weeks before the alleged vandalism was ever said to have occurred. Prosecutors asked that the charges be dismissed because the evidence no longer supported Pirro’s claim, evidence that, it bears repeating, had been available to the government the entire time.
@salonofficial Can #JeaninePirro survive the Reflecting Pool debacle?
The dismissal did not stop with Hearn. Within days, Pirro’s office also moved to drop misdemeanor charges against three more people accused of the same phantom vandalism. Justin Carreno, Sophie Dennison-Gibby and Cameron Thiers all faced lesser counts of destroying property worth less than a thousand dollars, and their attorneys told reporters the common thread was simple: The federal government had just spent millions repainting and relining the pool, and when the work failed, the Trump administration needed a scapegoat. The entire theory of the case — that ordinary citizens had descended on a national monument with knives to sabotage it out of political spite — evaporated once anyone with subpoena power actually looked at the evidence.
The saga of the Reflecting Pool is emblematic of everything amiss in America right now, a perfect diorama of how right-wing media turns Trump’s fantasies into public reality, and then tries to quietly conceal the wreckage once the facts catch up.
The saga of the Reflecting Pool is emblematic of everything amiss in America right now, a perfect diorama of how right-wing media turns Trump’s fantasies into public reality, and then tries to quietly conceal the wreckage once the facts catch up. Fox News was happy to amplify the vandalism narrative when it was useful. But once the case fell apart, the network gave it barely cursory treatment, a striking silence from an outlet that had spent weeks covering the alleged desecration of a national monument when the story served the White House.
That silence makes sense once you remember Pirro’s origins. She spent years at Fox telling viewers whatever the moment required. By her own network’s private assessment, she was a “reckless maniac” whose 2020 election fraud claims helped make Fox liable for one of the largest defamation settlements in American history: a $787.5 million payout to Dominion Voting Systems.
Pirro’s appointment as U.S. attorney represented the full realization of the MAGA media pipeline, in which performative loyalty on television is treated as the primary qualification for federal law enforcement authority. What she is now discovering is that a courtroom does not run on the same rules as a cable television set. At Fox, Pirro could tell her audience whatever she wanted without personal consequence. Telling a federal judge the same kind of thing carries the threat of disbarment and perjury charges, and no amount of bravado previously reserved for on-air broadcasts could change that math.
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Predictably, the moment Pirro chose self-preservation over total subversion of the law, Trump turned on her. He spent days publicly berating her, complaining to reporters that she had “folded like an umbrella” and writing on Truth Social that he fully disagreed with his own Justice Department. In a rambling, incoherent stream of consciousness to reporters from the Oval Office on Monday, he continued to insist on the existence of security tapes showing mysterious figures cutting the pool lining with box cutters — tapes no one has ever produced — while simultaneously trying to shift blame for the pool’s historical leaks onto previous administrations. On Monday, Trump met privately with Pirro and Burgum while reports circulated that he was considering replacing her.
After her Senate confirmation in August 2025, Trump promised Pirro would be a powerful crusader, and she has spent the year since prosecuting his perceived enemies with a zeal that has not been matched at trial. Her record in court is poor, with her office winning only half of its first eight criminal trials in 2026 a rate CNN reported was far below the national average. Bloomberg Law’s reporting describes a string of similarly threadbare cases: a man charged with assaulting a federal officer using a Subway sandwich following Trump’s deployment of National Guard troops in the District, who was acquitted by a jury but forced to flee his home after receiving threats; a Maryland woman jailed nearly a week for spitting on an officer at the National Zoo before the charge was quietly reduced and then dropped; a man left with permanent injuries after being tased during a high-speed chase, and whose federal charge also collapsed into a misdemeanor plea. The latter was interviewed by a Bloomberg Law reporter about his ordeal and was, according to the outlet, found dead behind a Washington rowhouse a month later.
Our Summer sale is on!
As people swept up in this kind of prosecutorial overreach have noted, the goal is not really conviction. It is using state power to inflict maximum disruption on a person’s job, housing and relationships, and to send a chilling message to anyone else who might draw the government’s attention. A conviction, when one happens, is treated as a bonus. The process itself is the punishment.
Pirro will likely survive this particular episode. Trump did not fire her over the weekend, and by Monday he had already moved on to blaming the judge instead. But something has shifted.
The former Fox star who built a television career on never conceding a point is now the first prominent member of this administration to publicly contradict Trump’s own account of a story he has told, in increasingly baroque detail, for weeks. It turns out that feeding Trump’s delusions is a great deal easier from behind a Fox News desk, where no one can hold you in contempt, than standing in front of a federal judge who can.
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about Trump’s Washington makeover
The post Jeanine Pirro’s Reflecting Pool reckoning appeared first on Salon.com.
President Trump spent the weekend raging on Truth Social against Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, after the Justice Department wrote in a motion to dismiss the case that issues with the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool were the result of bad refurbishing work — and not the product of vandalism, as it had previously alleged. Trump still insists vandalism is to blame.
In the Friday court filing, the DOJ acknowledged that Trump’s $14 million Reflecting Pool renovation was “hasty and botched.” In the filing, the DOJ said it was dropping its case against former Olympian David Hearn, whom the Justice Department accused of vandalism around the time that the renovation was getting bad press, including reports that the new lining was coming off in floating chunks. Hearn pleaded not guilty to the felony vandalism charges in D.C.’s Superior Court before the case was dismissed last week.
Trump has, aggressively, not reached the same conclusions as his DOJ and brought his online anger with Pirro to the airwaves on Monday during an unrelated Oval Office meeting, during which he suggested Pirro “choked” in building a proper case against Trump’s perceived enemies for the supposed sabotage.
“Frankly, I think she choked, because the judge was really vicious. Instead of going after the people that did it, the judge went after her and went after her department, and I guess she choked,” Trump said.
Shortly after Trump’s Oval Office outburst against Pirro, CNN published a report this afternoon that Trump is considering removing Pirro over the filing, citing two people familiar with Trump’s thinking. Per CNN:
The president is “furious” with Pirro, one of the sources said, telling CNN that he fumed about her all weekend. They added that based on his criticisms of her, they find it “highly likely she’s removed from her job.”
The other source, a senior administration official, said Trump was “blindsided” by Pirro’s court filing: “The president did not know beforehand that she was going to do that.”
Trump reportedly spoke to Pirro on Saturday and she blamed career officials in her office for the Friday filing (though her name is on the bottom of it). It was the around the same time that Trump was publicly unleashing on her via Truth Social.
“I disagree 100% with Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, on the Reflecting Pool. I don’t know what she was thinking? To me, it was a pure case of VANDALISM,” he wrote.
Up until this point, Trump has had no reason to question Pirro’s work. As TPM reported earlier this year, Pirro was one of a group of U.S. attorneys who met with Trump earlier this year and received a verbal lashing from the president for not acting fast enough to carry out his personal retribution crusade. Shortly after that meeting, the Federal Reserve received grand jury subpoenas from Pirro’s office, related to testimony that then-Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell — one of Trump’s favorite perceived enemies — gave Congress last summer about a Fed building renovation.
Shortly after, Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) told the New York Times that she received requests for an interview with Pirro’s office; the FBI and others within the DOJ were at the time looking into Slotkin and other Democratic lawmakers who participated in a social media video aimed at reminding military service members that they shouldn’t obey illegal orders. Trump suggested that the Dems should be arrested and charged with “seditious behavior, punishable by death.”
Seems like the retribution-inspired honeymoon between the two might be over.
Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin has attracted ire from Trump’s base of supporters because he more or less conceded that the American farming industry needs migrant workers in order to survive. It’s a fact that played a political role in Trump’s decision early in his second term to flood blue cities with his Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to carry out his mass deportation clampdown in urban areas — largely avoiding, at least initially, rural parts of the country where immigrant labor is often what keeps farms running.
During a bipartisan National Governors Association meeting in Oklahoma on Saturday, Mullin spoke about changes that need to be made to seasonal work visas to accommodate the year-round farm work demands of the agriculture industry.
“If we’re looking to grow our economy, then we need to look at making more permanent solutions on this,” Mullin said, reportedly adding that the “narrative” that immigrants steal Americans’ jobs is “not true for all industries.”
“It is America First. We want to take care of Americans first. It’s our economy. It’s our homeland. But there’s a way to utilize labor where we’re not having the participation rate where we need to. And we can plug those holes,” he said.
Mistake on his end, per The New Republic:
These remarks triggered extraordinary offense among MAGA figures. Fox News personality Tomi Lahren raged that Mullin is out to “appease liberal media.” Laura Loomer called on Trump to fire Mullin immediately. Podcasters Steve Bannon and Jack Posobiec both told Politico that MAGA wants Trump to replace Mullin with someone who, as Posobiec put it, “puts deportations first.”
Per new reporting from CNN today:
“We are looking for new creative and unconventional ways to pressure and punish Iran,” an officer in US Central Command’s intelligence branch wrote in a message sent Wednesday to a broad group of military analysts, according to a source familiar with the message. A second source also said that a senior US military officer sent the message last week soliciting new ideas for how to deal with Iran.
Hunter Walker unpacks Trump’s bombastic remarks from the Oval Office today, during which he publicly let slide his disgust for blue cities: Trump Launches Into Extraordinary Rant About ‘Disgusting’ Blue Cities: ‘Their Trees Are All Gross’
The House Ethics Committee put out a report recommending the censure of Rep. Chuck Edwards (R-NC) over his treatment of and behavior towards two young women on his staff. Kate Riga digs in here: Bizarre Texts, Gifted Guns, 30 Types of Ice Cream: Rep. Faces Censure Following Sexual Harassment Allegations
New from Sarah Posner: How Netanyahu’s MAGA Evangelical Backers Are Grappling With Backlash Against Him
The Low-Energy Response to the GOP’s ‘High-T’ Politics
She protested ICE raids. Then agents showed up at her door
Federal prosecutors have moved to dismiss criminal charges against former U.S. Olympian David Hearn after concluding that damage to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool was caused by a flawed renovation rather than vandalism.
The Justice Department filed a motion Friday asking a federal judge to dismiss the felony case, acknowledging that peeling and deterioration at the recently renovated pool stemmed from “flawed installation by the contractor” and not from Hearn’s actions. The reversal follows the discovery of Interior Department records showing the project had experienced significant installation problems before Hearn was accused of damaging the site.
Hearn, a former Olympic canoeist, was charged last month after surveillance footage showed him stopping at the Reflecting Pool and touching sections of the blue liner that had begun peeling away. Prosecutors initially alleged he intentionally damaged the newly renovated surface, a felony offense carrying a potential prison sentence.
According to court filings, however, federal prosecutors later learned that contractor records documented widespread failures in the installation process. The Justice Department also said key information about the renovation problems was not provided before the indictment was returned.
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The Reflecting Pool renovation became a high-profile project after the Trump administration ordered a makeover ahead of the America 250 celebrations. Soon after reopening, however, visitors documented algae blooms, bubbling surfaces and peeling liner, prompting questions about the quality of the work.
Hearn has maintained that he merely touched material that was already separating from the surface and did not cause any damage. His attorneys have called on the government to apologize, arguing he was wrongfully prosecuted based on incomplete information.
Hours after the charges were dropped, Trump disputed the Justice Department’s conclusion in a Truth Social post, writing that “vandals” were responsible for the damage and criticizing prosecutors for abandoning the case. Federal prosecutors, however, cited newly obtained Interior Department records and additional evidence in concluding the damage was caused by problems with the Reflecting Pool’s installation rather than Hearn’s actions.
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about Reflecting Pool
The post DOJ reverses charges in Reflecting Pool vandalism case appeared first on Salon.com.
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