Scapegoats

President Trump has built much of his political career on a simple formula: every problem has a villain. If gasoline prices rise, someone is gouging. If the economy sputters, it’s Biden’s fault. If a foreign war goes sideways, someone else provided bad intelligence. The Reflecting Pool fiasco may be the best example yet of what happens when reality refuses to cooperate with Trump’s penchant for gaslighting his way out of every predicament.

The administration never treated the damaged reflecting pool as a maintenance problem, or—gasp!—their own mismanagement. They treated it as a crime.

Former Olympic canoeist David Hearn was publicly accused of vandalizing the newly renovated pool after video showed him touching loose sealant. President Trump repeatedly declared the evidence obvious. The Justice Department secured an indictment. Administration officials insisted they had caught the culprit.

But, then the facts failed to comport with Trump’s narrative. Court filings from U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro’s office acknowledged that the damage was not caused by Hearn. Internal National Park Service communications showed engineers had raised concerns about the pool’s failing liner before Hearn was ever arrested. Prosecutors concluded the damage stemmed from flawed installation by a contractor rushing to complete the project before the America 250 celebration.

So, the villain wasn’t the Olympic athlete. It was—as was obvious to everyone—a botched construction project.

That should have been the end of the story. A prosecutor’s duty is to follow the evidence, even when it undermines a politically popular narrative. Instead, it became the beginning of another search for someone to blame.

According to multiple reports, Pirro was summoned to the Oval Office carrying a box of evidence to defend her decision. The meeting became contentious. Pirro blamed Interior Secretary Doug Burgum for misleading the president about the evidence. Trump, meanwhile, has declared that Pirro “folded like an umbrella” and suggested her job was suddenly in jeopardy.

Trump told Pirro he was “not happy” about her decision. “Well I just think she was totally wrong,” Trump told reporters this week. “And everybody saw the vandalism.”

By rebuking Pirro, Trump is burnishing a culture of denial within his administration, regardless of what the facts are.

“He just blows it up like a keg of dynamite—it’s a form of intimidating employees to be in group-think,” said Rice University presidential historian Douglas Brinkley. “’If you work for me, you triple down.’ Never disagree with the boss, even in a small fractional way.”

The president never acknowledged that his own conclusion might be wrong. Instead, the target simply changed. First it was David Hearn. Now it’s Jeanine Pirro.

This case is emblematic of Trump’s approach to all political quandaries. It’s about a governing style in which admitting error is less acceptable than finding a new patsy to blame. If the facts don’t support the preferred narrative, the narrative stays the same while the supporting cast changes, and it doesn’t matter who gets hurt in the process—as long as it’s not Trump.

We’ve seen this before. Cabinet secretaries receive “bad advice.” Intelligence agencies failed the president. Career bureaucrats misled him. Prosecutors lacked courage. Someone else is always responsible.

The Reflecting Pool case is especially revealing because the contradiction didn’t come from political opponents or investigative reporters. It came from Trump’s own DOJ. His own hand-picked U.S. attorney filed papers in federal court stating that the evidence did not support the charges. That should have prompted a simple response: We got it wrong.

Instead, it prompted an Oval Office confrontation. The irony is hard to miss; the administration frequently argues that Americans have lost faith in institutions. Yet few things undermine confidence in the justice system more than the perception that criminal prosecutions are driven by politics. If prosecutors are praised when they pursue a politically useful case but criticized when they abandon one that lacks factual support, what message does that send to every other prosecutor watching?

David Hearn paid a personal price for defending himself against allegations that are simply bullshit. Jeanine Pirro, after finally acknowledging those facts, now finds herself under attack from the very president who appointed her.

The real lesson of the Reflecting Pool isn’t about cracked sealant or failed construction. It’s about what happens when a political narrative becomes more important than the truth, and this has been the governing style of autocrats since the dawn of time. But Americans are now being told that they need to fear an upstart socialist movement in the Democratic party instead of the fascist already occupying the White House.