Of all the scandals that have beset the nation during the years of the Trump regime, few have so neatly represented the would-be dictator as his despoliation of the Reflecting Pool between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument. The overgrowth of green slime caused by Donald Trump's idiotic attempt to refurbish the pool evokes the disgust most Americans now feel at the mention of his name.

This episode includes all the varieties of Trumpian scandal we now anticipate in regular rotation. Scheduled for completion by the Fourth of July's 250th anniversary, it is a shambles and yet another Trump-sponsored national disaster.

From its inception, this was a typical instance of presidential corruption, which saw the White House deliver a no-bid contract to a firm called Atlantic Industrial Coatings, which just happened to have done similar work on swimming pools at the Trump Organization's Virginia golf club.

With no controls and little oversight, the cost of the contract keeps rising: having promised to spend no more than $1.8 million, Trump has paid over $14 million, and no doubt the price will continue to escalate.

Separately, but similarly, the White House gave a $1.7 million no-bid contract to another firm, Greenwater Services, to clean up the algae infestation in the Reflecting Pool. Like the initial contractor, this outfit also did work at a Trump golf club, in Bedminster, New Jersey. Naturally, its principal owner is a shady businessman, sporting a greasy pencil mustache, who happens to be a wealthy Trump donor, a Palm Beach neighbor of the president, and a conspirator in various bribery and illicit donation schemes.

Aside from the slime and sleaze, the Reflecting Pool fiasco captures the environmental ignorance and narcissistic vandalism that Trump embodies. While the administration might reasonably have tried to remedy the pool's longstanding drainage problems, Trump hired his cronies to coat the bottom with a substance in "American flag blue" that quickly began to peel off, causing more trouble.

Having failed to consult scientists — whose wisdom he always disdains — the president made the pool's problems worse by increasing the impact of climate change. Turning the pool dark heated it up and made it even more hospitable to algae growth.

As the Cultural Landscape Foundation noted in a lawsuit filed to stop the painting of the pool, it is an "aesthetic injury" — like so many Trump projects — that will "fundamentally alter the existing harmony, solemnity and dignity of the current memorial landscape.

Although Trump and his minions have lied repeatedly about the Reflecting Pool, claiming it is crystal clear when everyone can gaze upon the murky results, he now needs someone to blame. Having botched this entire process with embarrassing stupidity and venality, he insists that the renovation scheme failed because of "vandalism." Indeed, he has claimed that numerous vandals have been apprehended.

On Monday, the president told reporters that five people had been arrested and another five are suspects, while he sought to shift the blame for his own ineptitude. “I can’t help it if somebody goes in with a knife and starts hacking it up," he said, while offering no evidence at all that any such attack has occurred. Nor would cutting the blue lining explain the recurring algae blooms.

As Andrew Egger noted sardonically in The Bulwark, the villainous alleged vandals "were so cunning, so devastatingly dastardly, that they managed to pull off this shocking act of national blasphemy without once being visible on the cameras embedded in the Washington Monument that transmit a 24/7 public livestream of the Reflecting Pool." Or else Trump was fabricating as usual.

The sole named individual man arrested so far — a former Olympic athlete named David Hearn, who merely reached into the pool to touch a detached piece of the coating — is manifestly innocent. Like others targeted by this impulsive and malignant president, he seems certain to be exonerated.

Not so the White House vandal and his henchmen, however. We will spend many millions and many months cleaning up the destruction he leaves behind.

Joe Conason is founder and editor-in-chief of The National Memo. He is also editor-at-large of Type Investigations, a nonprofit investigative reporting organization formerly known as The Investigative Fund. His latest book is The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism (St. Martin's Press, 2024). The paperback version, with a new Afterword, is now available wherever books are sold.