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The Slatest
What started as a wild story about the Reflecting Pool has turned serious—and terrifying. Photo illustration by Slate.
Photos by Kent Nishimura/AFP via Getty Images and Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images. This story is adapted from the Slatest newsletter. You can sign up here to get it in your inbox every day.
Nominally, Jeanine Pirro is the U.S. attorney for D.C., appointed by Donald Trump and tasked with enforcing the law in the nation’s capital. In reality, Pirro’s job—like that of everyone else in Trump’s orbit—is to protect the president’s ego, image, and delusion.
Pirro briefly confused these two roles recently, and it almost cost her her employment. It’s a lesson in how our government works now, and also, it involves the best story of the summer: the total disintegration of D.C.’s Reflecting Pool.
Sorry, start at the very beginning. What’s going on with the Reflecting Pool? The Trump administration, as part of its program to beautify Washington, announced that it was going to “fix” the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, which had long been clouded by algae and generally not super nice to look at.
Trump promised to make the pool nicer than ever before, with his team asserting that his predecessors were incompetent not to have done so. Except, of course, keeping a massive outdoor pool pristine and leak-free is complicated, and Trump’s renovation flopped: The algae came back, joined by pieces of the pool’s new lining floating in the water. Beyond that, it came out that the administration had awarded a “no-bid” contract to the firm tasked with making the pool great again, and that—per the National Park Service’s own analysis—the firm was benefiting from an excessive profit margin. The whole thing became a delicious metaphor for his second term: Claim you can easily fix something difficult, fail miserably, and get some corruption in along the way. OK, but what does this have to do with Judge Jeanine? Well, Trump couldn’t just take responsibility for his pool flop, and so he did what he often does: He made up a bunch of stuff. In this case, he blamed vandals for damaging the pool.
It was briefly funny, then it got ugly. Federal prosecutors charged several people with vandalism, including former Olympic canoeist David Hearn, a 65-year-old who maintains he just picked up a piece of loose lining because he was curious …
… Wait, Trump made ridiculous claims to excuse one of his administration’s failures, and those actually became the grounds for federal charges? Yes. Some real North Korea “Dear Leader” stuff. Still waiting to hear about Pirro, though …
OK, here we go. On Friday, Pirro’s office asked a court to drop the charges against Hearn, telling a judge that “botched installation”—and not this Maryland sexagenarian—was to blame for the pool’s subpar condition.
(Charges against other individuals were dropped on Monday, NPR reports.) Pirro’s team blamed the Interior Department for the flub, saying it had misled prosecutors about the pool. I bet Trump didn’t like that! Indeed. Trump wasn’t going to let the truth get in the way of his preferred pool narrative, and he certainly wasn’t going to stand for that truth coming from inside his administration. So the nation’s top propagandist went to work, again claiming, without evidence (and, in fact, with clear counterevidence), that the pool was plagued by vandals—and going after Pirro personally in an Oval Office rant yesterday. “I was disappointed with Jeanine Pirro, really disappointed with Jeanine Pirro,” he said. “She folded like an umbrella, and people get away with things.
It’s a disgrace.” He also said she “choked.”
So it’s curtains for Judge Jeanine? It got real close. She was summoned to the White House Monday to meet with Trump and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, whose department oversaw the renovation and who is standing by the president’s official (phony) “vandalism” line. Pirro brought a box of documents to make her case, and the meeting got heated, but ultimately, so far, she still has a job. Why should I care about this?
I also am not losing any sleep over Pirro’s employment status, and I’ve always believed that the pool story is—as my colleague Christina Cauterucci explained—useful more as a metaphor than as a policy issue. But this cycle illuminates an ongoing problem that afflicts the Trump administration. That problem: When Trump says ludicrous things, his team scrambles to prove the president right—all so he never has to admit he’s wrong. Sometimes, this is as banal as Stephen Miller going on cable news and repeating Trump’s lies at a high volume. But increasingly, it involves using government resources to manufacture fiction. And in this case, it means that people who are clearly innocent are facing federal charges. Beyond that, by publicly dressing down Pirro for putting that pesky “rule of law” ahead of the “word of Trump,” the president further made clear to his entire administration that they work to reinforce his version of reality—even if that requires bending the facts and breaking the law.
Did anything else happen today that is extremely relevant to this topic but in a much scarier way? Glad you asked. Trump’s pick for U.S.
attorney general, Todd Blanche, cleared a big hurdle in the Senate. Blanche became Trump’s nominee by facilitating his conversion of the Justice Department into a personal cudgel for use against the president’s personal and political enemies. He got the job after his predecessor, Pam Bondi, was fired for not moving quickly enough to find ways to charge those enemies with crimes. You can bet that Blanche won’t make Pirro’s mistake. And that means trouble for all of us. Tolga Akdoğan
Before we get to good stories, I have good news: Ian is back tomorrow!
Get ready for his return with, courtesy of my colleagues, some good advice on potato salad, parenting, and pricey underwear. A revealing dispatch from across the pond: Kim Kardashian’s underwear empire has expanded to the U.K., to much fanfare. Slate contributing writer Imogen West-Knights visited the massive new Skims flagship in London to see what the fuss is all about. She expected to dislike the store—but that’s not exactly what happened. A potato PSA: Before your next cookout, you need to read Danny Palumbo’s guide to making a better potato salad. In the course of researching nearly 50(!) recipes, he discovered the secret to making potato salad with real flavor.
It turns out it’s not what you mix into the dish that makes it delicious—it’s how you cook the potatoes. And there’s one genius recipe that has cracked the code. Sound advice for a struggling new parent: Slate’s advice columnists have heard it all over the years, so our parenting advice column has been bringing back some classics from the archives. Today, we’re resurfacing this gem, in which former Slate columnist Rumaan Alam (the author of Leave the World Behind, which became a Netflix movie a few years back) responds to a letter writer whose husband is not helping around the house.
An oddly satisfying word game: If you’re a fan of crosswords, we have a new twist for you. In Slate’s SoundBites, you fill in words in response to a series of clues, and the highlighted letters reveal a “sound bite”: a letter or set of letters that make a single sound. Then you sound out those highlighted letters, pronounced as they appear in the original clue answers, to solve the final mystery word. Give it a try! That’s it from us.
Thanks to Ian for lending me the chair, and, above all, thanks to you for reading. Get the best of news and politics
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