ACCORDING TO LIZ - In 2016 Trump swept into Washington pushing a package of ethics reforms to “drain the swamp” in the nation’s capital. This was supposed to include placing strict limits on lobbying.
This year, the maestro of the sales pitch has the capital roiling with corruption and has unveiled a new swamp on the National Mall.
Like Washington politics, the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool has unending issues that no administration has been able to resolve. It leaks tens of millions of gallons every year. And turns green, especially in summer, when algae thrive in its stagnant, shallow water.
Construction of the 2,028-by-167-foot Reflecting Pool started in 1914, and it was dedicated in 1922. It holds about 4 million gallons of water. The original bottom of asphalt and tile was replaced with concrete slabs during a not-so-successful 2009 rebuild.
The ongoing saga’s current cast of characters:
Donald Trump, a president with a longtime strategy of not admitting mistakes and treating concessions of error as signs of weakness.
David Schutzenhofer, who the Prez selected to oversee the overhaul, was a man with no training in engineering or architecture and whose sole qualification has been running a Trump Organization golf club in New Jersey for the previous twenty years.
In January, Schutzenhofer hied himself to the World of Concrete trade show in Las Vegas where vendors referred him to…
Rodney Jarboe, the president of a Missouri-based company called Creative Polymers which specializes in fast turnaround time for formulating high-quality polyurethane, polyurea and epoxy systems.
In February Schutzenhofer negotiated with…
Ohio-based Greenwater Services, owned by a Trump donor, for water-treatment equipment called nanobubblers to kill the algae, before negotiating with Jarboe in March about coating the pool with a sheet of blue polyurea.
But, for the renovation to be completed by July 4, work would have had to begin by the first week of April.
The tight schedule was initially threatened by… Trump tariffs on resins from China and elsewhere. Jarboe was able to make a deal with….
California-based Rhino Linings to manufacture polyurea coating in a shade called “American flag blue” at its Texas factory. Which delighted the president. And obscured a raft of other monumental problems.
Rhino subcontracted application of the liner to the concrete of the pool to…
Virginia-based Atlantic Industrial Coatings, a company that had never won a government contract. Perhaps for good reason.
Doug Burgum’s Interior Department handed out no-bid contracts left and right despite other, more qualified companies expressing interest, bypassing Federally-mandated reviews from qualified career employees and preservationists aiming to ensure taxpayer money was not wasted and national icons were not damaged. And squelched doubts about the costs and risks.
Both were extraordinarily high, and both were magnified by the tight timeline.
With no reasonable justification, Atlantic requested a 20% profit margin, despite Park Service procurement channels declaring it “inflated” and “excessive” – and was bestowed that and a million dollars more for a total of $14.7 million.
The Interior Department swept aside all hurdles.
Later on, a department spokesperson, declared “President Donald J. Trump is an expert builder who fixed the Reflecting Pool permanently before deranged people vandalized it.”
Perhaps the most deranged person was the president who, on April 23, announced the scheme to the nation and, as usual, puffed up his own participation by claiming he chose one that had (purportedly) already worked on a Trump golf club in Northern Virginia – huh? – and appeared oblivious to the fact that the 2,000-foot-long Reflecting Pool might not operate like a recreational swimming pool
As problems arose with the liner blistering and perforating, people seeking the president’s favor such as Federal Housing Finance Agency head Bill Pulte putting out flattering memes shading over the truth from public exposure.
Mission accomplished?
In early June Trump boasted, “This was highly sophisticated material, industrial strength, that could last for 100 years.”
The renovation began peeling within the week.
Then, after the algae-eating nanobubblers were removed for the Ultimate Fighting Championship bouts at the White House, the green goblin of the Washington swamp returned with a vengeance with Trump mendaciously claiming vandals “threw a little fertilizer in the water” to promote the algae blooms.
Proof of failure was not squirreled away in some secret warehouse below the city, but on the National Mall for all to see
As work on the pool became more visibly defective, the finger-pointing began with…
Jeanine Pirro, U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, falsely accusing members of the public with crimes.
A 49-year-old veterinarian was charged with destruction of property for scooping up a floating piece of liner afraid an animal would eat it. She paid $6,000 in legal fees and faced up to six months in jail.
Others were cited or arrested for purportedly damaging Federal property with a clearly fallacious screed from the “real” Donald Trump leaving people wondering how long he can last out in his cloud cuckoo-land.
In announcing felony charges against former Olympic canoeist David Hearn on July 2 for allegedly tearing up a piece of the pool’s liner, Pirro crowed about her success in advancing the administration’s war against “unchecked vandalism and civil disorder.”
Four weeks later, Pirro was forced to eat crow as the charges were dismissed and, in a filing, she turned her ire on the Interior Department for misleading her prosecutors by claiming the damage was due to vandalism and not botched installation.
This filing provided a far more detailed accounting of the pool’s problems than the Interior Department had ever released, underlining that the coating application became “rushed and flawed” as workers raced to meet unrealistic deadlines.
The dismissal of these multiple criminal vandalism cases left Trump seething at Pirro for not doubling down on his promise to clean up the city. He couldn’t let go of his own narrative and, on August 9, irrationally claimed a National Park Service employee had witnessed Hearn "violently" vandalizing the Reflecting Pool.
Just one more attempt to deflect public opinion from yet another incidence of presidential “mission failure”… How fast has presidential prestige faded into the swamp of Washington egos since George W. Bush declared “mission accomplished” at the onset of the forever wars.
(Liz Amsden is a former Angeleno now living in Vermont and a regular CityWatch contributor. She writes on issues she’s passionate about, including social justice, government accountability, and community empowerment. Liz brings a sharp, activist voice to her commentary and continues to engage with Los Angeles civic affairs from afar. She can be reached at [email protected].)
