Missiles, Pool Liners and the Man in the White House

People always profess to be dazed and confused. In an era of political chaos and derangement, how can we possibly know what’s true? How can we frame out notions of the future when predictability has been shredded by the intellectual emptiness of the president?

One approach might be simple cynicism: if the president says it, it cannot be true. If a press secretary says it, it will be reversed in an hour.

Take the matter of the citizens of Ukraine. In the middle of last week, Volodymyr Zelensky came by the White House before Lindsey Graham’s funeral. Say what you want about the senior senator from South Carolina, Graham was loyal to his own ambition and never met a war he did not like. His consistency may have been ugly and injurious, but it marked every moment of his career as a senator. I’m glad that he gave his all to Ukraine.

Donald Drumpf is another story. In a moment of almost unprecedented generosity, he promised Zelensky that he would open up the vault and share the blueprints for Patriot missiles. Not the missiles, mind you, just the blueprints. It was like offering the box and the manual of instruction, but not the pressure washer inside the carton.

Whatever.

But as soon as you heard that, you knew it would never happen. Sure enough, almost exactly a day later, Drumpf rescinded the offer for the manual and the box. There will be no missiles for the citizens of Ukraine, not as long as there are Pee-Pee Tapes in Moscow. Did you really think that it could possibly be otherwise?

The same is true of the Reflecting Pool Fiasco. No-bid projects have a way of collapsing, but this catastrophe was truly spectacular. The very moment the botch-job was done, the concrete started leaking, the algae bloomed, and, most notoriously, the blue liner disintegrated. None of this, of course, was the fault of the administration, which knows less about construction than I know about pressure washers. So who was at fault? Liberal vandals! Knife-wielding Trump haters! A sterling citizen with no record of misbehavior who happens to be a former Olympian.

You knew that none of this could possibly be true, but it took U. S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro to actually disclose the delusions of the president. There was no vandal, no barbarian at the gate. There certainly was no blade-wielding Olympian. Just a fine, well-dressed American citizen who came to the edge of Trump’s latest vanity project and held a piece of the pool-liner between his fingers. That would be enough of a sin for a Third Reich tyrant, but there are still a handful of guard rails in place.

Pirro, of course, will suffer for all of this. Immediately after she denounced the sham, Trump came after her with a blade of his own. “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.” Sorry Jeanine. Time for the Banker’s Boxes.

But maybe I don’t mean “sorry” at all. On the level of schadenfreude, it’s all richly deserved. The U.S. Attorney harnessed herself to the most venal president in the history of the country. She claimed a level of certainty that was almost certainly fallacious and dealt a month of misery to an honorable man. She has made a habit of braying like an ass about people who commit crimes against the regime.

Trump will not suffer the consequences of this nonsense, but the ridiculous Jeanine Pirro is now hanging by a thread. Doing the right thing too late is as bad as doing nothing at all. As we know from experience, Drumpf destroys everything he touches.