Vice President JD Vance emerged from a weekend of peace talks in Switzerland with Iran to announce the first significant nuclear concession Tehran has yet made: International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors, he said, will be allowed back into Iran as a condition of the deal. More on the negotiations below. Happy Monday.

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Straight to Jail, Right Away

by Andrew Egger

Until now, Donald Trump’s shambolic attempts to renovate the National Mall’s Reflecting Pool have been just a silly, funny sideshow. But this weekend, the story took a more sinister turn. As news spread that the new “American Flag Blue” coating was already sloughing off the bottom of the pool, Trump went looking for somebody to blame—and predictably went with the most authoritarian available option.

“The United States Park Police have arrested multiple individuals for vandalizing our Nations [sic] magnificent Reflecting Pool,” Trump posted on Saturday night. “These are very serious crimes having to do with the destruction of National Monuments. Years in jail!”

Nothing had been wrong with the pool coating itself, the president insisted: “Ours worked perfectly, including the mirror like finish . . . the Reflecting Pool was never so beautiful as it was just one week ago.” But alas, some theatrical villains had come along and ruined it for everybody: “They took some form of knife or blade, and put a 250 foot long gash into the beautiful facade of what took so much work, competence, and money to build and complete. They also poured corrosive and destructive chemicals into the Pool.”

These villains, it seems, were so cunning, so devastatingly dastardly, that they managed to pull off this shocking act of national blasphemy without once being visible on the cameras embedded in the Washington Monument that transmit a 24/7 public livestream of the Reflecting Pool. Plainly, we are looking at some serious criminals here. But rest assured that Trump is on the case: Many people, he claimed, have already been arrested.

Is that true? Who knows! At least one arrested person has already been identified, however: former U.S. Olympian David Hearn, who told ABC News he was arrested Friday after heading to the Reflecting Pool to see it for himself and touching a piece of the blue coating that had come partially loose. “I did not remove, I did not damage, I did not rip, tear, break, destroy, or harm any part of the Reflecting Pool,” Hearn insisted.

Last week, I argued that the Reflecting Pool renovation boondoggle was “a striking metaphor for the failures of Trump’s second term” that had failed in the same way Trump projects these days often fail.¹ Trump’s attempts to spin the failure have been typical, as well: He first tried to insist the problems were invented or imagined; then, when they became too obvious for even his fans to ignore, he pivoted to denouncing them as deliberate sabotage from his enemies.

All this is still, I suppose, pretty funny. But it’s worth reflecting on the fact that it’s only America’s remaining free institutions that allow it to remain so. It is extraordinarily unlikely that David Hearn or anyone else will actually face legal repercussions for touching the failing pool bottom. But that’s no thanks to Trump, who would absolutely give a few wrong-place, wrong-time bystanders “years of jail” to pass the blame if he actually had the sweeping authoritarian powers he claims and craves.