Water Damage

By Nick Catoggio

Monday, June 22, 2026

 

The state of the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool is a sort of moron-populist version of Chernobyl. In both cases, the government’s incompetence and corruption created a vexing ecological problem. And in both cases, the government undertook to cover up its culpability in the matter.

 

The difference is that the problem that vexed the Soviets was a cataclysmic nuclear meltdown. The problem that’s vexed the White House is algae.

 

The pool saga began as a project to beautify the structure by making its water a glistening blue. From the jump, per the New York Times, the White House cut corners by not addressing the real problem, the pool’s pipes. Instead it awarded a no-bid contract for a quick fix to a firm owned by a Trump donor—except that the quick fix, applying sealant to the pool’s bottom, didn’t solve the issue of water leaking between the concrete slabs.

 

Days after the renovation was finished, the pool had more algae in it than at any point in June over the last five years.

 

Workers were dispatched last week to dump hydrogen peroxide and “advanced nanobubbler technology” into the water to kill the algae. In short order, pieces of blue material from the newly treated bottom began peeling off and floating to the surface. The algae? Still not dead.

 

This weekend the president admitted that contractors will “probably be forced to release and drain much of the water in order to do the necessary repairs.” But it wasn’t a botched job that he blamed for the embarrassment; it was “SICK, DERANGED PEOPLE” who had “seriously vandalized” the pool by supposedly ripping off chunks of the blue sealant.

 

Former Fox News talking head turned U.S. attorney Jeanine Pirro dutifully vowed zero tolerance for pool-peelers. And she meant it: One man arrested by Park Police on Friday claims he did nothing more than touch a piece of floating debris before the cuffs were slapped on. At last check, armed members of the National Guard had been hastily deployed to stand watch over a basin that’s now almost as green as the Chicago River on St. Patrick’s Day.

 

It’s all so stupid. And because it is, there’s no way to write about it without being seduced by metaphor or drawing Grand Lessons About Trumpism from it.

 

Our friend Andrew Egger drew one last week. Plowing ahead with a suspiciously easy solution to a complex problem and making a preposterous mess of it explains the war in Iran as well as it does the reflecting pool, he observed. The secret sauce of kakistocracy is ignorance paired with hubris, the belief that all policy failures can be remedied by a bold leader eager to impose his will, and that’s what we’ve gotten on both fronts—with predictable results.

 

Another lesson from the pool fiasco arrived this weekend when the Guard was dispatched, the ideal finishing touch on a renovation process that had already been distinctly Trumpist in its method. Scapegoating phantom “vandals” for the peeling sealant and calling in the military to deal with them is an unwitting self-satire of strongman fragility, inventing enemies and turning an absurd problem into a quasi-emergency because the president can’t bear to accept blame for having screwed up the project so badly.

 

You’ve heard of Hanlon’s Razor? The White House has its own version: Never attribute to one’s own stupidity that which is adequately explained by another’s malice.

 

There’s a third lesson, and this one also points back to Iran. Between the war on algae and the war abroad, Trump has never looked more pitifully impotent than he does right now.

 

The perfect metaphor for his first year back in office came when, without warning, he demolished the East Wing to make way for his precious ballroom. That episode captured the political zeitgeist of 2025: Americans had elected a caudillo who cared not a bit about the country’s civic traditions and would bulldoze them—literally—to get what he wanted, whether the other branches liked it or not.

 

The reflecting-pool idiocy is the perfect metaphor for his presidency in 2026, coinciding as it does with our national humiliation in Iran. Postliberalism promises effective problem-solving through energetic authoritarianism, but as things stand, not only can’t the authoritarian in chief forcibly open the Strait of Hormuz, he can’t even successfully clean a public pool in D.C. The zeitgeist has flipped.

 

‘America cannot do a damned thing.’

 

The negotiations in Switzerland this weekend advertised a major intangible benefit for the Iranians. They’re going to have many opportunities to humiliate the president and his country in the months ahead. And they’re going to take them.

 

Celebrating the impotence of the United States has always been important to the regime. Ruhollah Khomeini famously crowed during the hostage crisis of 1979 that “America cannot do a damned thing,” a line that became a revolutionary slogan. Another hostage crisis played out this year in the Strait of Hormuz and again America couldn’t, or wouldn’t, do a damned thing to end it.

 

When, during the endless negotiation process to come, the Iranians get the occasional chance to remind the world of it, they’ll seize it. They already have.

 

They did it on Sunday via stagecraft when their delegation arrived for talks with J.D. Vance, Jared Kushner, and Steve Witkoff. The Americans were allowed to enter the room first, inadvertently (but accurately) signaling that our country is more eager for peace than the enemy is. When the Iranians finally showed, they were supposed to pose for a handshake and photo op with the vice president—but refused.

 

Then, after the event began, they walked out.

 

The walkout was their response to new comments by the president, who’s losing his mind at hawks here and in Israel condemning his deal as a Munich-tier sellout by a feckless weakling. On Saturday, with the summit looming, Iran announced that it had closed the strait again to protest new Israeli attacks on Hezbollah in Lebanon. That made Trump look like a schmuck and he knew it, and he let it all out the following day in a phone interview with Fox News.

 

“We’ll take over the rest of your country…. I’ll blow the s—t out of them,” the president reportedly said of the Iranians, sounding every inch like the talk-radio call-in guy from Queens that he is at heart. At one point he fantasized about the U.S. seizing control of the strait and charging 20 percent tolls on transiting oil tankers, leaving it ominously unclear whether he meant Iran’s tankers or all tankers. He went on to warn the enemy that if they close the strait again “you won’t have a country,” then threatened the regime’s diplomats in Switzerland: “You won’t even make it back to your f—king country.”

 

That’s when the Iranians left the summit, the diplomatic equivalent of extending a middle finger. (They did eventually return.) What was stopping them? Trump has given them every reason to believe he won’t restart the conflict, even admitting that he sought peace because he feared the standoff in the strait would cause a global recession if it persisted. Iran can afford to flout his belligerence. America cannot do a damned thing.

 

Well … America could exit the deal, I guess, if the ongoing humiliation became too much for Trump to bear. At some point his enormous vanity will supersede his desire for lower gas prices. For Iranians, the trick in embarrassing the president is to limit themselves to minor insults that hurt U.S. prestige while continuing to participate in negotiations, giving the White House an incentive to let those insults slide.

 

That’s why they returned to the summit after their walkout, I’m sure. They’ll never get a deal from the United States sweeter than the one they’ve just received; sanctions on the country’s oil exports have already been waived and some frozen assets have been returned, per the Iranian foreign minister. They’d be fools to let their interest in showcasing Trump’s impotence alienate him to the point that he quits negotiations.

 

So instead, I expect, they’ll casually belittle America whenever possible, bait its leader into pathetically and ineffectually threatening to restart a military campaign that’s already failed, and keep talks going at all costs to try to extract extra concessions. Call it the art of the deal, Tehran-style.

 

The most artful element, though, is the wedge it’s driven between the U.S. and Israel.

 

Israel cannot do a damned thing.

 

Humiliating Trump wasn’t Iran’s core goal in severing the White House’s interest in peace from the Israelis’ interest in security. Its goal was strategic: The regime wanted to weaken its most dangerous regional adversary by creating a rift between that adversary and its more powerful patron.

 

And damned if they didn’t succeed. It’s a master stroke.

 

For all the hype about the $300 billion reconstruction fund that hopefully won’t ever happen, the greatest long-term victory for the Khomeinists under the deal was getting the U.S. to agree to include Lebanon in its terms. That incentivizes the White House to use its leverage over Jerusalem to restrain future Israeli attacks on Hezbollah. Going forward, Trump could have peace or Israel could have its right of self-defense, but it’s one or the other.

 

Guess which one he’s going to choose. “The president told me he is disappointed Israel can’t put Hezbollah away,” Fox News reporter Trey Yingst reported after interviewing Trump on Sunday. “He went on to say, ‘They can’t do anything without knocking buildings down’ and that he is close to giving it to Syria. He is talking about empowering Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa to actually go into southern Lebanon and fight Hezbollah.”

 

In fact, the biggest news out of this weekend’s summit was an agreement between the U.S. and Iranian delegations to create a “deconfliction cell” that includes Lebanese representatives—but not Israelis, it appears—to “ensure the adherence of the termination of military operations in Lebanon.” In other words, the U.S. will be responsible for restraining a sovereign nation from acting in its national security in parallel to Iran restraining a non-state terrorist proxy that acts at its direction.

 

All of that is in Iran’s strategic interest, needless to say. But it also serves the Iranian goal of making a spectacle of American impotence. How many countries have lost a war so decisively that they functionally switched sides as part of a peace deal, shifting from working with an ally to weaken a mutual enemy to working with that enemy to weaken that ally?

 

Vance has even begun to jab at Israel and its supporters in his frequent public appearances defending the deal. “What is your exact proposal?” he wondered, addressing the hawks in Benjamin Netanyahu’s Cabinet. “You’re a country of nine million people. You can’t just kill your way out of solving every single national security problem that you have.” In another interview he scolded advocates for the Jewish state by pointing out that “it’s just not the case that every criticism of Bibi Netanyahu’s policy decisions leads to antisemitism or is antisemitic.”

 

He even gave Israel the Zelensky treatment during his remarks in the White House briefing room on Friday. “If I was in the Cabinet of the Israeli government, I might not be attacking the only powerful ally I have anywhere in the entire world,” Vance warned, reminding Israelis that “over the last few months, two-thirds of the defensive weapons that protected your homeland have been built by American hands and paid for by American tax dollars.” Has Israel said thank you once?

 

Vance has his own political reasons for pitting himself against the Jewish state. It puts him on the right side of American public opinion; it reminds his anti-war Israel-hating Lindberghian base that he’s still one of them; it ingratiates him to the president by reframing Israelis’ justifiable shock at the mortifying terms of the Iran peace agreement into selfish ingratitude toward Trump; and it earns him some goodwill from the Iranians whose cooperation he needs for this deal not to blow up in his face.

 

But there’s no way around the fact that the vice president aligning himself with critics of the White House’s ally in this conflict is a remarkable testament to U.S. impotence in 2026. Because America cannot do a damned thing to force Iran to reopen the strait, our least bad play is to keep the Iranians happy by making sure Israel cannot do a damned thing either.

 

It occurs to me that the United States under Trump now has, or will soon have, no very close allies left. For most of my life, Canada, Great Britain, and Israel each had “special relationships” of various sorts with Washington; upon being reelected, the White House immediately set about destroying the first, is hard at work on destroying the second, and seems increasingly willing to risk the third if Iran’s hostage-takers demand it. If it’s true that you can’t be a superpower without allies, our national impotence in this moment is more severe than it looks.

 

That’s also why a silly story like the reflecting pool has captured the imagination of so many Trump critics otherwise preoccupied with war and peace. Whether in Iran or at the Lincoln Memorial, the president’s supposed grand fixes to longstanding problems keep making those problems considerably worse. He doesn’t know what he’s doing, then doesn’t know how to undo what he’s done, and then inevitably defaults to blaming others for sabotage—whether that’s Israel or reporters allegedly “vandalizing” the pool by handling pieces of sealant debris floating on the surface.

 

In the case of the pool, all that’s missing is offering the algae $300 billion to withdraw.

 

How does a strongman behave once the entire world, save for about a third of his own country, loses all confidence in him? We’re going to spend the next two and a half years finding out. But probably not well.