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Hey fam: I am concerned that the Great Reflecting Pool Scandal is lulling us into a false sense of security.
Also: I have a correction about something I said on a podcast that wasn’t right. I hate making errors like this and it’s important to fix them, transparently, when I do. But it also raises some questions about how the medium affects our standards for accuracy.
This edition of The Triad is unlocked. I’d appreciate you helping me think through this question in the comments after #2.
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1. Distortion
Once upon a time, we used the word “scandal” to describe any bad story about a politician. Getting caught in adultery or bribery or even mild criminal behavior was “a scandal.”
I stopped used that word about Donald Trump some time around the Charlottesville neo-Nazi march in 2017. It didn’t seem to fit. Calling a white power march that ends in murder a “scandal” isn’t right. It’s confusing venal and mortal sins. Watergate might be a scandal. Kent State is not.
The Trump era has been choc-a-bloc with mortal sins. The killing of Heather Heyer. The deaths of a million Americans from COVID. The attempted coup. The felony convictions. The blood libel against Haitian immigrants in Ohio. The extra-legal rendition of innocent men to a torture prison in El Salvador. The dismantling of USAID. The public executions of Renée Good and Alex Pretti on the streets of Minneapolis. The war with no consultation with Congress and no plan to win. The destruction of the American-led global order.
These are not “scandals.” They are crimes, or depredations, or assaults on democracy.
Which is why I’ve felt a comforting sense of nostalgia about Trump’s ongoing Reflecting Pool debacle. It feels like an incident from the Before Times.
It’s just a scandal.
Trump’s buffoonery beggars belief.
The manager at Trump’s Bedminster golf club seems to have recommended a Mar-a-Lago pal of Trump’s to the National Park Service for the job of cleaning up the Reflecting Pool.
Why is the Park Service soliciting advice from a guy who runs a Trump golf club? Good question!
Having been connected to Trump’s friend, John Cafaro, the Park Service proceeds to give him a no-bid contract. This contract comes with a scandalously high profit margin. Cafaro’s company proceeds to do work so shoddy that the Reflecting Pool is back in crisis just a couple weeks later.
The Trump administration insists that the work done on the project was great, actually, and all of the problems at the Reflecting Pool are the result of vandals, or domestic terrorists. Or antifa. It was probably antifa, right?
Oh, and the Trump buddy who got the no-bid contract and did the no-show job looks like this:
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That, my friends, is an old-fashioned scandal. The stakes are low. The graft is small-scale. No one is killed or tortured. The money involved is only nine-digit figures.
We obsess about Trump’s Reflecting Pool fuck-up because it lets us pretend, for a moment, that we’re back in normal, scandalous territory. It’s a comfort.
It’s also a lie.
We are not in the Before Times. We are at a point, far out there, where the structures are failing us. Not all of them. But more than we ever thought possible.
We are past the era of scandal. We live in an age of democratic backsliding; an age of decline.
Sometimes, authoritarians present themselves as openly evil: Stalin, Pol Pot, Khomeini, Mao.
But most of the time they appear cloaked in buffoonery: Mussolini, Gadaffi, Saddam, Bokassa, Idi Amin, Hugo Chávez, the Kims.
Their silliness tricks people into dismissal. How could someone who dresses like Captain EO and uses a Praetorian guard called “The Revolutionary Nuns” be a real threat?
One of the things Democrats used to say early in the Trump years was, “This is not who we are.”
You don’t hear that line much in the second Trump administration, do you? Because Trump’s second election probed that this is who we are. All of that stuff up top—that list of crimes and depredations—a plurality of Americans affirmatively chose it. It wasn’t an accident of the Electoral College or a case of false advertising. We saw the COVID deaths and the coup. We heard him say he wanted to be a “dictator” who would “terminate” parts of the Constitution. We saw his libel of Haitians and his pledge to deport 20 million immigrants.
Don’t let the Reflecting Pool fool you with its member berries. We don’t have the privilege of living in an age of scandal.¹