Well, this would be embarrassing if anyone was still capable of feeling shame.
After all the months of screeching about Marxist antifa vandals going on a spree of cutting 300-foot-long slits in the Reflecting Pool’s crummy new liner because they hate Donald Trump and America, after all the law enforcement resources thrown at arresting and prosecuting sightseers for so much as sticking the tip of their finger in the pool’s water only to see the Justice Department drop every case and admit to judges that they didn’t have enough evidence, after all the highest-level administration officials who went on TV and swore up and down that no, really, those crazed leftists really did sabotage the pool but Americans could rest easy in the knowledge that the full force of federal law enforcement would be brought down on the heads of these scumbags ... after all of that, we have now learned that the contractor who painted the pool liner told the administration a month ago, Oops, that was our bad.
What a stupid, stupid time to be alive.
The New York Times got hold of documentation in which the contractor selected to install the pool liner, Atlantic Industrial Coatings, “found problems in the design and execution of the renovation.” You don’t say!
But the bigger problem, the company said, was that the repair plan laid out in the contract called for the layers of liner to include two chemicals that turned out to be incompatible. [...] The contractor said it had not expected that outcome because it was very uncommon to mix the two products in that way.
It turns out that when you do mix these two products in this way and leave them lying out on concrete in the summer Washington sun, the chemical that was sprayed on top of the other will get so hot that the bottom layer will blister and come loose. Hence, all the peeling paint.
Isn’t this the sort of thing you want to test somewhere off-site, or even in just one tiny corner of the Reflecting Pool, before you go and paint the entire thing and make this mess? Even your Wonkette writes rough drafts in Word, on the off chance that Substack might decide to eat our post before we can share it with our hot and sexxxy readers.
And maybe in a normal project with plenty of lead time, Atlantic might have done more testing. But President Depends made them rush so the pool would be ready for the big July 4 celebrations he had planned:
[T]he government bypassed competition and gave Atlantic a no-bid contract to carry out an untested approach designed in part by the general manager of one of Mr. Trump’s golf clubs.
Oh well, it’s only $14.7 million government dollars down the drain. Sure, that’s $14.7 million that Trump can’t spend on gold filigrees that look like something you pick up at the Dollar Store that he can super-glue to the White House walls. But we’re sure he’ll find a way.
Meanwhile, the government is still pretending that vandalism really did happen. An Interior Department spokeswoman told the Times that the vandals “repeatedly reached into the pool and ripped at the coating.” And all the White House would say was that President Trump is making Washington “safe and beautiful.” Sure, if your idea of beautiful means tacky and half-assed.
Atlantic is now repairing the pool by tearing up whatever blue lining didn’t peel away on its own. Eventually the contractor plans to reapply the liner, but it’s going to “consult” with the manufacturer of the chemicals first. There is no word on what will happen if the manufacturer says You idiots already went down this road, maybe it’s time to come up with a solution that will work.
People were charged with felonies over this, for fuck’s sake. And even after the local US Attorney, Jeanine Pirro, crawled out of the bottom of a wineglass long enough to drop the charges, Trump was still insisting she was getting it wrong, there had too been vandalism by America-hating communists, shut up.
We’d like to think this is the end of the saga, but if there is one thing we have learned about life under Donald Trump, it is that everything can always get dumber.
[NYT]
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Thank God, I've gotten away with it. The box cutter is now framed and hanging above the mantle.
Paraphrasing Krugman:
The Trump administration: it's Hegseths all the way down.