The 13 Steps of a Trump Fiasco

The Reflecting Pool drama says everything about how the administration operates. If you wanted to make an argument that we are all living in some cruel simulation, a key piece of evidence might be that the news keeps providing us with absurd, occasionally quite alarming metaphors for what it's like to exist in 2026. To wit: The London School of Economics recently canceled an event on extreme heat because of an extreme-heat warning issued by the United Kingdom's Met Office. Or, closer to home for Americans: Donald Trump, trying to renovate the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool for America's 250th birthday and, instead, scoring a tax-payer-funded, $14 million-over-budget own goal in the form of a cracked and peeling, green-algae-riddled, potentially duck-killing militarized zone in the nation's capital. One of the firms hired for the renovation is named Greenwater Services.