Trump’s Embarrassing Failure to Find a Scapegoat for the Reflecting Pool Disaster

Trump’s Embarrassing Failure to Find a Scapegoat for the Reflecting Pool Disaster Austin Sarat When things don’t go well for President Trump, his usual response is to search for someone or something to blame. Rigged elections, weaponized prosecutions, and the deep state are some of his favorite targets. So when his plan to renovate Washington’s iconic Reflecting Pool turned into a fiasco, it was not surprising that he went back to a familiar playbook. For more than a century, the pool has connected the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial, but Trump concocted a scheme to drain it, paint its bottom “American flag blue,” and have it ready to go for the 250th anniversary celebration of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. The result: Soon after the company selected by Trump to do the work was finished, the paint began to peel, and, as The Guardian’s David Smith observed, “a massive algae bloom had turned the pool a green reminiscent of a plane passenger clutching a sick bag. It also stank….” But, instead of investigating what went wrong, Trump quickly searched for a scapegoat. Writing in 1979, the famous social theorist Rene Gerard said that scapegoating is a way of redirecting responsibility to a single “vulnerable target.” The logic scapegoating, Gerard notes, can be traced back to ancient religious traditions, which would sacrifice the scapegoat to satisfy an angry God. In the case of the Reflecting Pool, Trump turned his anger into accusation. “We had vandalism,” he said. “It’s not a lot of damage, but we’ll probably have to let the water out and re-fix it. They went in there with a knife. I was just told by the people over at Parks, five people are arrested, and five people are under investigation right now – and it’s a sad thing.” His accusation seemed to bear fruit when, on July 2, Jean Pirro, his handpicked choice as U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, announced, as the New York Times reported, “the indictment of the 67-year-old ex-Olympian David Hearn for trashing ‘sacred’ government property.” At the time, Pirro said, “This is not only a priority for the president, but for myself….We will prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Hearn willfully destroyed property.” Hearns’ legal team contended that he had done nothing more than other tourists had done by reaching into the Reflecting Pool and touching a piece of bottom coating “that had already detached.” He “released it when asked to do so by a park employee and left the pool in no worse condition in which he found it.” On July 16, they made a motion to dismiss the indictment in which they alleged that, among other things, the government “failed to preserve the key physical evidence in this case: the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, including the section of its liner that Mr. Heam is charged with damaging. Two weeks later, and less than a month after Pirro filed the initial charges, Hearn got what he asked for when she notified a federal district court of her plan to drop the indictment. Her