DC insider gives up the game: Republicans ignore waste when Trump is responsible

President Donald Trump’s supporters in Washington are applying a massive double standard when defending the Republican leader’s mismanagement of the Reflecting Pool renovations, at least according to one prominent conservative commentator.

“The pool now must be drained again for repairs, meaning even more taxpayer funds must be spent on it,” wrote The Bulwark’s Joe Perticone on Tuesday. “So I spoke to some of the fiscal fauxhawks on Capitol Hill about this becoming a money pit. After all, isn’t this a good example of just the sort of willy-nilly government spending they ought to address?”

Perticone then went through a list of Republican lawmakers with whom he spoke on the subject.

“This is our nation’s capital,” Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) told Perticone. “Everything should look pristine.” The Alabama Republican also repeated Trump’s unsubstantiated claim that the Reflecting Pool has turned green with algae due to vandals.

“The people, they need to be arrested and jailed and throw the key away,” Tuberville argued, later responding to Perticone’s observation that there is no evidence of either arrests or sabotage of the pool that “they’ve arrested people.” For this reason, Tuberville said there must be some sound basis for Trump’s claim that the pool was vandalized, saying that “I don’t think they’d arrest people just to be arrested.”

Sen. Steve Daines (R-MT) made a few concessions about the poor state of the Reflecting Pool but refused to blame Trump himself.

“Well, I think getting the reflecting pool looking beautiful again is a good thing,” Daines told Perticone, although he admitted when pressed about its current state that “no, it doesn’t look very beautiful. We gotta find out what went wrong with it; [it] needs to be corrected. It’s a great part of the experience coming down to the Mall.”

Meanwhile Sen. James Lankford (R-OK) refused to answer questions about the Reflecting Pool at all.

“I have no way to be able to answer that,” Lankford told Perticone about the renovation. “But we do need to fix it, but I have no way to answer that. I’ve not been tracking that.”

As Bruce Wolpe from The Conversation wrote earlier this month, Trump has made a number of attempts to renovate Washington DC monuments with mixed reception. When he unilaterally destroyed the East Wing of the White House to build a ballroom, former First Lady Hillary Clinton said, “It’s not his house. It’s your house. And he’s destroying it.”

Wolpe then put the controversy over the Reflecting Pool renovations into that context.

“The pool has been troubled for decades with plumbing and drainage issues, algae, trash, and discoloration,” Wolpe said. “Trump wanted it fixed in time for America’s 250th on July 4 this year. No-bid contracts with friendly associates were signed. There was cleaning, waterproofing, sealant and its now-famous ‘American Flag Blue’ color.”

He added, “The repairs failed within days. The algae were back, the drainage was clogged, the color was anything but blue. Trump blames vandals for trashing the pool and shredding the sealant. A former Olympian was arrested for putting his hand in the water to feel the torn strip of the blue paint.”

Overall, Wolpe characterized this as part of Trump’s larger failure to gain control of events during his second term.

“The Reflecting Pool is for the people to gather, to remember, to reflect, to honour, to celebrate, to breathe,” Wolpe wrote. “Now, like so much in this second Trump term, it has fallen into scandal and disrepair.”