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.

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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. 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. 

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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According to a Pew Research Center survey released in October 2025, large majorities of Americans are unhappy with both political parties. Three-quarters were frustrated with the Democrats, and almost as many felt the same about the GOP. Half said they are downright angry with both parties. Partisanship is responsible for some of it, of course. But despite all the talk from Donald Trump about the “golden age” of America being upon us — symbolized by the gaudy, gilded gew-gaws all over the White House and Washington — just over a third of Republicans said their party makes them feel hopeful, and far fewer noted it makes them feel proud. Democratic voters were even less hopeful and proud than their rivals. This is not a healthy political system. 

The loathing for the parties doesn’t just come from the high-profile national campaigns. Republicans and Democrats alike have been taken over in recent years by a populist uprising coming from within. From the Tea Party on the right to Occupy Wall Street and the Bernie Sanders-led democratic socialist movement on the left, there has been a large shift away from the traditional politics of party leaders and ideological conformity to a more grassroots-oriented politics. 

Both sides have at least one thing in common: They loathe the political and media elites who, they believe, have lost touch with ordinary people and run the country for their own interests. This should not surprise anyone who has observed politics for the past 30 years or so. Those elites have shown their tone deafness toward the concerns of the average American for decades, and the rise of cable television and the 24-hour news cycle, conservative talk radio television, the internet and social media have successively given people a front-row view of their pretentious arrogance. 

One person in Washington perfectly illustrates this phenomenon: Sally Quinn, the longtime columnist and doyenne of what remains of the Georgetown set. Married to the legendary Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee until his death in 2014, Quinn has functioned, at least since the 1980s, as the self-appointed spokeswoman of the nation’s permanent political establishment. 

In 1998 she wrote the seminal essay on official Washington’s state of mind during Ken Starr’s investigation into Bill Clinton. The day of that year’s midterm elections, the Post published “Not in their back yard: in Washington, that letdown feeling,” which quoted numerous political and media denizens expressing their shock and horror at Clinton’s inappropriate behavior with Monica Lewinsky. Those interviewed insisted their disgust wasn’t about the unseemly power differential between the president and the former White House intern, and they insisted it wasn’t about the sex. Rather, they were apparently upset that Clinton had lied to them about the affair, as if they thought that it all would have been fine if he had just shared it with them privately at a glittering, intimate dinner party. 

The quotes were unbelievable. “There is a small-town quality to the grief that is being felt,” said journalist Andrea Mitchell, “an overwhelming sadness at the waste of the nation’s time and attention, at the opportunities lost.” Muffie Cabot, Nancy Reagan’s former White House social secretary, mourned, “This is a demoralized little village . . . the emperor has no clothes. Watergate was pretty scary, but it wasn’t quite as sordid as this.” 

But the piece de resistance came from the then-dean of the Washington press corps, Post columnist David Broder, who lamented, “He came in here and he trashed the place — and it’s not his place,” as if the nation’s capital belonged to him and Quinn and their kind, rather than the American people. 

Quinn vapidly observed in passing, “For reasons they cannot understand, Washington insiders come across to the public as judgmental puritans, shocked and horrified by the president’s sexual misconduct,” which was completely off the mark because contemporary polling showed that people saw the non-stop, six-year crusade against Clinton by the GOP and media establishment as over-the-top and hypocritical, not that it excused Clinton’s conduct. 

As the election results trickled in later that night, it emerged that Republicans had unexpectedly lost seats. House Speaker Newt Gingrich was forced to resign his seat, and just a few months later, on the very day he was impeached by the House, Clinton’s approval rating reached 73%. The number was not an endorsement of the president’s behavior; it was a reaction against the hypocrisy of the GOP and the elitism of the same establishment elites Quinn portrayed as the nation’s moral conscience.

One might have thought Quinn and her fellow Washingtonians would have taken a beat to question whether they were actually qualified to be the voice of American democracy when they were so clearly out of touch with the people. But that didn’t happen. 

Now, nearly 30 years later, Quinn is at it again, this time railing against Donald Trump in the same tone she deployed against Clinton. 

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No longer writing for the Post after it acquiesced to Trump and MAGA after the president’s return to office, Quinn instead contributed an op-ed to the New York Times called “Watergate-Era Washington Was Less Toxic Than This” that described how vulgar and frightening D.C. has become under the second Trump administration. She claimed that everyone is terrified, even Republicans, and waxed nostalgic for the days when she and the “charming, funny, bright, thoughtful” Lindsey Graham, the late Republican senator from South Carolina, could talk about throwing bipartisan dinner parties together. Sadly, those days are over, and the barbarians have trashed the gates — again. The crude Trumpers are having too much fun with their vulgar galas and economic excess. 

Evoking the Watergate crisis, Quinn seemed to have no recollection of eagerly joining that earlier GOP crusade against Clinton, despite the widespread understanding of its cynical partisan nature — and how that marked the beginning of the Republican Party’s descent into the ruthless partisan warfare that resulted in Trump’s election and non-consecutive reelection. 

On Sunday, Quinn wrote another essay for the Times announcing “It’s No Longer So Much Fun to Be MAGA in Washington.” Apparently, the inhabitants of the village have noticed that the GOP, under strain from the relentless failure of Trump’s policies, isn’t feeling its oats so much these days. She describes a “popular annual cocktail buffet at the Hay Adams Hotel on the rooftop overlooking the White House” on the night of Trump’s UFC cage fight on the White House lawn. The party’s attendees laughed and scoffed at the “garish,” “grotesque” and “bizarre” scene below, much relieved they were suddenly feeling the return of “bipartisan” revulsion at the spectacle of a usurper “trashing the place.”

I confess that I, too, was appalled at the grotesque display that night. And I, too, have nothing but revulsion for everything Trump stands for. But when I read those words coming from the likes of Quinn and her elitist comrades, I actually felt some sympathy for Trump’s MAGA followers. Quinn’s description of this soi disant aristocracy literally looking down on the plebes who refuse to know their place was almost enough to make me don a red cap and burst into a rousing rendition of “YMCA.” 

Nothing provides a boost to Trump’s MAGA agenda like the brand of Washington snobbery Quinn’s writing chronicles, and it’s this kind of thing that’s driving both parties to populism. If Republicans and Democrats could come out of their corners and recognize their common foe, we might actually get a little of that vaunted bipartisanship for which Quinn and her fellow travelers are so nostalgic. 

Unfortunately, it might not work out so well for them if that happens.

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