Rob Wittman portrays himself as an expert on the Chesapeake Bay. He earned a Ph.D. and reportedly wrote a 532-page dissertation on what makes shellfish programs work. His own son is a waterman who works in the Bay. Wittman grew up in the Chesapeake watershed, and has built nearly two decades of campaign branding around being the Bay’s man in Washington.So why has Rob Wittman never once promised to do anything for the people who make their living on the Bay? Since his first campaign in 2007, Wittman’s campaign platforms have never mentioned our watermen, oyster growers, crabbers, aquaculture farmers, processors, or seafood houses. We read every Bay-related pledge he’s ever published and the words “waterman,” “oyster,” “crab,” “aquaculture,” “menhaden,” and “seafood industry” appear a combined ZERO times. The man whose son works on the water campaigned, cycle after cycle, as if the people who make their living on the Bay don’t exist.

Campaign promises aside, what has Wittman attempted or delivered for the health of the Bay and the livelihood of the people who work there? Nothing.

But one metric stands out: after Wittman’s 19 years in office, the Bay’s health is worse than before he started.

His recreation over our livelihoods

Virginia’s seafood industry delivers a $1.1 billion boost to the state economy, supports more than 7,100 jobs, and generates over $168 million in labor income. Virginia ranks number one on the East Coast for oyster production and first on the Atlantic Coast for seafood landings, with landings worth more than $200 million in 2020. Roughly 6,000 Virginians work on the water, including some 2,866 licensed watermen – including Wittman’s own son.

A huge share of that economy lives in VA-01. The Northern Neck, the Middle Peninsula, the rivers feeding the Bay — these are Wittman’s district. When he talks, as he so often does, about the Bay as an “economic driver,” he is describing the work of people to whom he has never shown support.

Compare that silence to what he does promise. His platforms find room for the recreational version of the Bay — for “hunting, fishing, and enjoying the natural beauty” (his own hobby, evidenced by the dead fish that adorn his DC office’s walls), for “tourists, sportsmen and women, and conservationists.” The Bay as a place to play, yes. The Bay as a place to work? Not a word.

The fight in his own backyard

Want to see what that silence costs? Look at Reedville, on the far tip of the Northern Neck — squarely in VA-01.

Reedville is home to Omega Protein, now a subsidiary of the Canadian conglomerate Cooke Inc., which runs the East Coast’s last industrial menhaden “reduction” fishery — grinding the small, ecologically critical fish into meal and oil. For years this has been the single most explosive Bay-industry fight in Virginia. One one side: jobs in a rural town. On the other side: the Bay’s small-scale watermen, along with the health of the Bay’s food web, including striped bass and ospreys.

Experts who monitor the health of the Bay are sounding alarms. Menhaden (the fish the small independent watermen rely on) are part of a food pyramid that, because of overfishing, may be collapsing. Virginia’s reported menhaden bait harvest collapsed from 5.4 million pounds in 2019 to under 1 million in 2024, even as the industrial reduction fleet kept pulling out over 100 million pounds a year. An overwhelming 92 percent of Virginia voters, across both parties, want more menhaden left in the Bay. Studies are urgently needed to examine exactly what’s happening to the menhaden population. Livelihoods are at stake.

This is happening in Wittman’s district, to his constituents, over a fish that sits at the center of the Bay’s food web. The congressman wrote a shellfish dissertation and has a waterman son, but his platforms are strangely silent on the issue. You will not find menhaden, Omega Protein, Reedville, or the reduction fishery anywhere in 19 years of his stated Bay agenda.

Wittman’s silence is a choice. And it is a choice that leaves both the workers and the Bay without their most credentialed and potentially most powerful advocate.

One law, zero reduction in pollution

So what did Wittman promise on the Bay — and did he deliver it?

For fifteen years, essentially his entire Bay platform has rested on a single piece of legislation: the Chesapeake Bay Accountability and Recovery Act. He first introduced a version in 2009, and a companion bill finally became law in December 2014, passing the House 416–0. We must give credit where it is due; that is a real, bipartisan law with Wittman’s name on it, and passing anything 416–0 in Washington is no small thing.

But read the fine print his own press shop will never highlight. CBARA is a budget-transparency measure. It requires the federal government to publish a “crosscut budget” tracking Bay spending across agencies, and it created an Independent Evaluator to report to Congress. That is all it does. It does not reduce a single pound of nitrogen. It does not cap a single ton of phosphorus. It does not plant one oyster or restore one acre of grass. It is accountability about the funding of the cleanup — not the cleanup itself.

For 19 years, “I cleaned up the Bay” has been the implied promise of the legislation he supported. The real deliverable was a spreadsheet.

The scorecard he doesn’t want you to read

As for the Bay itself: here is where the gap between the branding and the reality becomes impossible to ignore.

In June 2025, the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science graded the Chesapeake Bay a “C” (50 percent), down from a C+ the year before. Eleven of 15 monitored regions showed declining water quality.

Worse still, 2025 was the deadline (established back in 2010) by which the Bay states were supposed to have their pollution cleaned up. But they blew it, for the THIRD time. Reductions in nitrogen — the pollutant that matters most — reached just 59 percent of the target. In December 2025, regional leaders quietly punted the finish line to 2040.

We should note two things. First, the long-term trend on nitrogen pollution is gently upward, thanks largely to wastewater-plant upgrades and climate change (which, incidentally, Wittman has studiously avoided talking about while also consistently supporting fossil fuel providers). Second, no single member of Congress controls a six-state, 1,000-locality cleanup.

But “the Bay is improving slowly and has missed every deadline” is not what the “CHAMPION OF THE CHESAPEAKE” was supposed to deliver over his 19 years in office. Wittman has been in office for the entire arc of the 2010 cleanup plan, from launch to failure. The health of the Bay he was elected to save has worsened.

What’s more, Wittman voted for measures that have created the Bay’s worsening conditions. Agricultural runoff is the single largest source of nutrient and sediment pollution entering the Chesapeake Bay. The Inflation Reduction Act (H. R. 5376) of 2022 included funds to help farmers mitigate the runoff of nitrogen, phosphorus, and sediment. This is important: for example, nitrogen is the pollutant most responsible for the Bay’s core ailment. Excess nitrogen feeds the algae blooms that decompose and create the low-oxygen “dead zones” that kill fish, crabs, and underwater grasses. Controlling that will help the Bay recover. Wittman voted against it.

The bill passed anyway (thanks to a Democratic Party majority) and was signed into law, and conservation funding began reaching farmers in 2023, with Bay-watershed states like Virginia among the beneficiaries. Then, in July 2025, the “One Big Beautiful Bill” (H. R. 1) that Wittman supported rescinded remaining funds, folded a reduced amount into the USDA budget, and dropped the climate and nutrient-reduction targeting language entirely.

So here’s the short story: Wittman voted against conservation funding for the Bay in 2023; it passed anyway thanks to the Democratic majority in the House; and three years later Wittman voted to cut the remaining funds and remove conservation provisions completely.

Rob Wittman worked to remove conservation funding for the Bay, and succeeded.

He cares more about your vote than the Bay

The Bay’s health is under further threat, and Wittman is at the center of it. The Trump administration is considering opening up waters on Virginia’s coast for commercial seabed mining, to include 2,500 square miles just north of the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay. The proposed operations would churn up the seabed to extract minerals, with impacts to: commercial fisheries and the coastal economy (fish, crab, oyster, clam, and scallop populations); wildlife and their habitats (dolphins, sea turtles, migratory whales, shellfish); coastal resilience and shoreline stability (including storm surges and coastal erosion); and military and space operations (submarines, space flight launches).

In December 2023, Wittman sent a letter to DOD promoting the expansion of deep-sea mining which, he said, would help the US obtain minerals for which we would otherwise be reliant on China. The letter was co-signed by 31 Republican members of Congress. This was not a bipartisan effort or anything approaching a broad consensus; Republican members of Congress, Secretary Howard Lutnick, and others are pushing to allow deep-sea mining, under the pretense of “national security” and certainly to support private profit from our limited, fragile natural resources. And Rob Wittman is at the vanguard of that effort.

So ask yourself this: if Wittman was truly concerned about the health of the Bay, the livelihoods of those who make their living from it, or the wildlife that relies upon it, would he proudly lead a partisan effort to open the Bay up to deep-sea mining operations that will inevitably damage the critical natural resource that so many in our district rely upon? Would he vote against conservation funding for the Bay, twice?

No, he would not. For Rob Wittman, the Bay is simply another lever he can pull to feign effectiveness and win your vote. He may say he cares about the Bay, but his actions show otherwise.

Where he showed up, and where he didn’t

To be clear about his record: Wittman has defended Bay funding. When President Trump tried to zero out the EPA Chesapeake Bay Program in 2017 and again in 2025, the Chesapeake Bay Watershed Task Force co-chairs — Wittman, Bobby Scott (D, VA-03), Sarah Elfreth (D, MD-03), and Andy Harris (R, MD-01) — pushed back, helping to secure $93 million for the program in the 2026 budget.

But defending the budget of a program that is missing its targets is not the same as restoring the Bay. And keeping the lights on at the Bay Program does nothing for the Reedville waterman watching his menhaden harvest collapse, or the oyster grower fighting for reef acreage.

Nothing is ever Trump’s fault.

Donald J. Trump, President of the US, is now in a public debate with a guy in an inflatable frog costume.  And the frog is winning.

This tells us a lot about the intelligence level not only of Trump but also of the people around him and those who support him.

Trump is now in a public feud with a person in an inflatable frog costume. He posted the frog’s photo to attack it as a “crazy pro-algae (likely paid) protestor.” This is the President of the United States.

He is losing a fight to a guy in a frog suit, and he started it.

Trump spent $14 million renovating the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool and dyeing it “American flag blue.” It promptly filled with algae and the paint started peeling.

Rather than admit the job was botched, Trump invented a conspiracy about “vandals,” sent in the National Guard, and had Park Police arrest a 67-year-old Olympian for touching a loose flap of paint.

It was already absurd. Then it went full idiocracy.

On Monday night, the President of the United States, leader of the world’s largest economy and commander of its military, sat down and posted a photograph of a protester in a giant inflatable frog costume. The frog was labeled “Amphifa.” It was holding a sign reading “First they came for the algae.”

And Trump, apparently, could not let the frog win.

“Here is another example of a crazy pro-algae (likely paid) protestor,” he wrote, deadly serious, before launching into a lengthy explanation of the Martin Niemoller poem the frog’s sign was parodying. He took the bait so completely that he annotated the joke.

He fact-checked a frog.

Somewhere out there is an ordinary person who put on a novelty amphibian costume, made a silly sign about pond scum, and stood near a puddle. And the most powerful man on the planet saw it, felt personally threatened, and fired off an official presidential statement declaring the frog a paid agitator.

The protester won the entire exchange without saying a word. The frog didn’t have to do anything. Trump did all the work himself, transforming a man in a costume into a national news story by being unable to ignore him.

A confident leader laughs at a frog. A secure man scrolls past. Trump cannot, because every joke at his expense lands like a wound, and he has to swing back at all of them, even the ones wearing inflatable green suits and standing next to an algae-filled pool he ruined himself.

The pool is still green. The paint is still peeling. And the President of the United States spent his Monday night at war with a frog. The frog is winning.

And Trump’s supporters are still the dumbest of the dumb.

On the morning of February 28th, the first day of Donald Trump’s war on Iran, the children of the Shajareh Tayyebeh elementary school in the southern Iranian town of Minab were at their desks a little after ten o’clock when the missiles arrived. The name of the school means “The Good Tree.”

By the time the dust settled, as many as 175 people were dead, most of them girls between the ages of seven and twelve. Iran’s confirmed count came to around 155, and the list its state broadcaster released documents dozens of dead little boys, dozens of dead little girls, more than two dozen dead teachers, several dead parents, a dead school bus driver, and a dead pharmacy technician from the clinic next door.

The teachers had started phoning families the instant the attacks began, begging them to come collect their children. There wasn’t enough time. Some parents reached the school only in time to claw through the rubble looking for their daughters, and according to first responders and a Reuters stringer the building was hit a second time, a so-called “double tap” (which is a war crime), with the survivors and the rescuers caught in that second blast and blown to pieces.

Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch both opened investigations. Reporters at TIME and elsewhere traced the weapon to an American Tomahawk cruise missile, the kind fired only by US forces in that war, and a preliminary military inquiry concluded our forces were almost certainly responsible for both the initial killing of the children and the double-tap that killed the firefighters, rescuers, and their parents.

When a reporter asked Trump about it at the G7 summit in Évian-les-Bains last week, he waved the dead children away as if they were nothing. “Nobody did that on purpose,” he said. “Mistakes are made, war is nasty.” Then he handed the question off to Pete Hegseth and moved on.

His shrug doesn’t survive contact with the evidence. An Al Jazeera investigation that traced satellite imagery back more than a decade found the school had been a clearly marked civilian building, walled off from the neighboring military base with its own separate gates since 2016.

A medical clinic that opened on the same complex barely a year before the strike was left untouched, while the school full of children was hit.

Either our targeting was precise enough to spare a brand-new clinic but careless enough to level a decade-old school, or the school was struck on purpose. The children, after all, were the kids of members of Iran’s military. Both answers are damning, along with the double-tap evidence, and there’s exactly one document that would tell us which is true.

That document exists. The Pentagon finished its investigation last month, and members of Congress still haven’t been allowed to see it. So a bipartisan group of senators has resorted to the only leverage they have left, moving to freeze 75 percent of Hegseth’s travel budget through the defense authorization bill until he hands over the unredacted civilian-harm investigations, Minab among them.

The same provision demands the unedited video of the boat strikes off Venezuela that have killed more than 200 people, which Trump and Whiskey Pete are also refusing to release. You don’t bury a report that clears you.

We’ve seen this reflex before, from the Amiriyah shelter in Baghdad in 1991, where American smart bombs killed more than 400 civilians the Pentagon insisted were a military target, to the Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz in 2015, where the official story changed three times before a US commander finally admitted the decision had been entirely American. Not to mention My Lai in Vietnam. Deny, deflect, and bury, every single time.

There’s a reason, however, that this particular cover-up may be more frantic than the ones that came before it, and it carries a name we’ve all heard way too many times: the machine helping choose our targets in Iran was Grok, Elon Musk’s AI chatbot.

We know this because the Pentagon’s chief digital and artificial intelligence officer, Cameron Stanley, said so under oath, swearing in a court filing that Musk’s “Grok Gov Model” let American forces “deploy over 2,000 munitions to 2,000 distinct targets within 96 hours” during the operation. That’s one target every three minutes.

Musk’s company signed its deal with the Defense Department on February 23rd. The war began February 28th. And we only learned any of this because the disclosure slipped out in a lawsuit the NAACP brought over a Musk data center accused of poisoning a Black neighborhood near Memphis with gas-turbine fumes.

This is the same Grok that spent the summer of 2025 praising Adolf Hitler, calling itself “MechaHitler,” telling users that people with Jewish surnames were the problem and that the Holocaust was the solution, and injecting white-supremacist “white genocide” talking points into conversations that had nothing to do with them.

That is the AI a Nazi-salute-giving apartheid-era South African billionaire wired into our targeting systems five days before we started killing Iranian schoolchildren.

I can’t tell you that Grok chose the school in Minab, and neither can anyone else, because the report that would answer that question is the one they refuse to release. That’s the point.

An AI that has openly admired a genocidal Hitler was helping aim American missiles at brown people at the rate of one target every three minutes, the deadliest day for civilians in the entire war. It happened on the first full day that machine was running, and the people who could tell us what it did are betting we’ll lose interest before they ever have to reveal what really happened.

I confess to a certain morbid fascination regarding what’s going on with Donald Trump’s Reflecting Pool obsession.

The story here seems to originate in Trump somehow becoming aware that the Obama administration spent $35 million on renovations/repairs to the pool. In characteristic fashion this has since become $100 million spent by Obama and Biden (The Biden administration didn’t spend any money on it and the $100 million figure comes straight out of Trump’s feculent ass. I assume Trump was put onto this entire stupid topic by one of the many crazed racists with an Obama obsession floating around the upper echelons of the American right wing).

So Trump got the idea to “fix” the Reflecting Pool, by making it more American and manly and strong and powerful, just in time for the celebration of his and America’s birthdays. Also in characteristic fashion, he just ignored federal regulations governing these kinds of jobs and handed the project to a Mar-a-Lago crony, in the form of a lucrative no-bid contract. This person, who happens to look just like a low-level enforcer for a minor Mafia family, then proceeded to spend $14 million, which was several times more than Trump promised the job would cost. The job appears to have been done in a shoddy/incompetent/corrupt way (surprise!), which has transformed the Reflecting Pool into an algae-ridden swamp (ironic).

This brings us to the latest installment of the saga, which is Trump’s spiraling obsession about the existence of some sort of conspiracy to destroy the strong and powerful beauty of the Reflecting Pool. This conspiracy, by parties as yet unnamed, is being carried out in two ways:

(1) By using a box cutter or knife to cut a gash or slit in the polyurea coating lining the concrete basin. This gash or slit — he has used both terms — was described by Trump as 250 feet long yesterday morning. By early afternoon he was claiming it was “290 or 300 feet long,” and by later in the same press conference he was saying it was 350 feet long.

(2) By dumping fertilizer and possibly other substances into the Reflecting Pool’s water.

The sheer insanity of this is hard to appreciate fully. First, the Reflecting Pool is in a very heavily trafficked public space that is also a major tourist attraction. It’s surrounded by all kinds of surveillance technology, as any such space is these days, especially in Washington D.C. In other words, it would be completely impossible to carry out any kind of covert sabotage operation at any scale.

Second, the causal theory here is completely bananas. How would one cut a several hundred foot slit into a polyurea coating with a box cutter or knife? This by itself would be nearly impossible to do — it’s a very tough, one might even say strong and powerful, substance — let alone doing so surreptitiously. As an extra added feature to all this madness, Trump himself was babbling back on May 4th about how it would be impossible to attack the Reflecting Pool with a knife, because it was was so strong and powerful, although he didn’t want to give anyone any ideas.

Third, what would the point be of doing this impossible thing, even if it were somehow possible? Why would cutting a several hundred foot slit in the pool’s protective coating turn it into an algae-choked swamp? What is the theory here exactly? What is the frequency Kenneth?

One theory about Trump’s most surreal/flagrant/insane lies is that they’re power plays of a classic authoritarian sort:

FWIW I don’t think that’s what’s going on in this specific case. I think Trump at least sort of believes in his giant slit in the pool conspiracy theory, because he is now, to use the technical clinical term, completely koo koo for cocoa puffs.

We’ve got to get out of this place, if it’s the last thing we ever do.

Our grand display of ignorance and stupidity in trying to deal with Middle East agreements is in full blown mode now. The career experts in the State Department have largely been tossed out, forced to resign or sidelined. So now we have some crooked political operatives/real estate goons with little to no knowledge of the culture, history of alliances/negotiations/conflicts etc. and how the Iranian government functions and is structured regarding policy and agreements trying to force things like it’s a tenant eviction case or a real estate foreclosure and they can’t figure out why it all keeps falling apart.

Never at any point have they been willing to consider that their whole approach to dealing with a Middle Eastern culture is the problem. As an example when they reach out to countries in the region to “help” they take whoever raises their hand, or sees a payoff, without regard to the long history politically and culturally between those countries. Western business goons are not the types to care or think it should be important. Therein lies the heart of the matter. The Western nations usually think negotiations should be done as they themselves negotiate between themselves. Never a thought to “When in Rome” so to speak.

As an example a buffoon like JD Vance would probably sit with the Iranian negotiators and say “Hey if we can make a deal you can all come to D.C. for the 4th of July and we’ll have a pig roast” and then wonder why that would be an offensive thing to offer. This is real life and it is not some TV tough guy show where we just bring more bombing and weapons. Only idiots fail to understand that these cultures have survived everything there is for a way longer time than the US has been around. They know world history and the history of conflicts around the world better than most people realize.

That knowledge of how to approach conflict, assess their foes and formulate strategy serves them well when dealing with lesser intellects like Vance, Crumb The First etc. To paraphrase the evil memory of Rumsfeld “The idiots don’t know what they don’t know.”

We are so stuck with the ignorant approach of believing that Iran “must” give in that the idiots at the wheel of foreign policy have gone to concession after concession and wondering why they have gotten virtually nothing in return. But the powers that be in this country refuse to consider the old saying about the definition of insanity.

We stopped being in a position of strength when we hooked ourselves to Netanyahu and his blood lust to bomb Iran again and again. We further degraded our position when we let Netanyahu continue on in Lebanon and to publicly make statements about not being bound etc. by any agreement between Iran and the US. The idiots showed the whole world that when it really comes down to it that Crumb The 1st is the servant of Netanyahu. That is not a position of strength and combined with cultural, political and historical ignorance it is a clear description of where we are.

🚨 HOLY CRAP! President Trump issued a DIRECT THREAT to Iranian negotiators in Switzerland

"You close [the Strait] and you won't have a country. You won’t even make it BACK to your f**king country.” pic.twitter.com/fPH7Xy1x8s

— Q Maga News (@Q_MagaNews) June 21, 2026

After hearing Trump’s threat, the Iranian negotiators who were meeting in Switzerland with VP Vance, Jared Kushner, and Tom Witkoff WALKED OUT OF THE MEETING. 

Everything Trump touches turns to shit.

BREAKING:

New footage emerged of VANDALS driving their SUVs on the newly finished pond sealant, effectively ruining it! pic.twitter.com/QUAcJBwaqN

— Jean-Claude Damn Van™ (@ChaosAgent_42) June 21, 2026

The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool has become a metaphor for the Trump presidency. Beginning in early April, Trump boasted he was going to fix the reflecting pool after what he claimed was gross neglect by former presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden. He claimed the repairs, including sealing the pool and painting it “American flag blue,” would cost about $1.8 million and that it would all be finished by July 4, 2026, in time for the anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Repeatedly, he bashed his predecessors over the pool, insisting that his skills would enable him to make it better than ever at minimal cost and that the repairs “could last for 100 years.”

The government declared the pool renovations complete on June 6, and water began flowing back into it. Trump immediately claimed it was a triumph. “Thank you President Trump,” he wrote on social media.

But the story was not over. David A. Fahrenthold of the New York Times reported that the repairs had, in fact, run far over budget, to at least $14.2 million. The administration had awarded a no-bid contract to a company Trump first said he had chosen and then said he didn’t know, and had agreed to a 20% profit margin, although a National Park Service analysis found that margin “inflated.”

And then, just a day after the reservoir filled with water, algae began to bloom in it. A spokesperson for the Interior Department said the algae were “residual” and a normal part of the process of refilling the pool. “President Donald J. Trump is an expert builder who has fixed the Reflecting Pool for good unlike the failed and extremely costly attempt by Obama and Biden,” she said in a statement.

Experts disagreed, saying that the darker bottom and the sealed seams meant the water would heat up faster than it had before and thus support more algae. By June 16, crews from the National Park Service were pouring hydrogen peroxide into the water to kill the algae that had turned the pool bright green even as Trump insisted the pool was perfect.

By Thursday, June 18, the new blue epoxy at the bottom of the pool was peeling off and floating in the vivid green pool. Fahrenthold reported in the New York Times that the National Park Service contracted not only the coating and painting of the pool under a no-bid contract, but also an additional $1.7 million contract for a water purification system.

That no-bid contract went to a firm whose ultimate owner is the J.J. Cafaro Investment Trust, led by Trump donor John J. Cafaro, whose wife chaired the 2017 International Red Cross Ball at Mar-a-Lago and who lives near Mar-a-Lago at a mansion that is listed as the water treatment company’s address in Florida corporate records. The name of the firm is Greenwater Services.

A spokesperson for the Interior Department said the White House was not involved in the choice of Greenwater Services and the department did not know of Cafaro’s political support for Trump when it awarded the contract.

Minnesota governor Tim Walz commented: “Found an imaginary problem, said only they could fix it, didn’t listen to experts, hired buddies who grifted millions, failed miserably, bragged how great it went. The entire Trump presidency in a nutshell.”

On Friday, former Olympic canoe racer David Hearn, 67, stopped by the pool on a 52-mile bike ride and reached into the water to feel what the detached material looked like. U.S. Park Police officers arrested him for destruction of government property, a misdemeanor. “I didn’t vandalize anything,” Hearn told David J. Lynch and Aaron Schaffer of the Washington Post. “I didn’t destroy or break or peel anything. By the time I realized what was going on, I was being put in handcuffs.”

Friday night, Trump blamed “Radical Left Lunatics, most likely Dumocats [sic], who have spent their lives trying to ruin our Country,” for “some real problems with Vandalism at the beautiful Reflecting Pool.” By this evening, he was blaming “multiple individuals for vandalizing our Nations magnificent Reflecting Poll [sic]. Who would do such a thing? These are very serious crimes having to do with the destruction of National Monuments. Years in jail! Work will begin immediately on its repair.”

Until his second term in office, Trump has always been protected from the fallout from his own actions, and it appears he has become accustomed to simply describing his fantasy world and expecting that others will agree they see it. If his “fix” for the reflecting pool failed, someone else must be responsible, and they must pay for it.

The pattern Walz identified with regard to the pool applies also to Trump’s debacle in Iran. And not only is the reflecting pool defying his narrative, so are Iran and Israel.

Israel has said it does not consider itself bound by the memorandum of understanding Trump signed at Versailles on Friday. That MOU said the U.S. and Iran “and their allies in the current war” would immediately and permanently stop military operations “on all fronts, including in Lebanon.” Israel has been attacking what it says are Hezbollah camps in southern Lebanon and has occupied parts of the region as a “security zone.”

On Friday, Julian E. Barnes of the New York Times reported that a recent U.S. intelligence report assessed that Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu is likely to continue striking Hezbollah despite the MOU. Hezbollah is funded by Iran and is continuing to strike northern Israel. David M. Halbfinger of the New York Times reported on Thursday that Israel was “stunned” by the U.S.-Iran MOU and sees it as “a cataclysmic disaster.”

Israel has continued to strike Lebanon, and after additional strikes last night, Iranian officials today announced that in the wake of these breaches of the MOU, they had, once again, closed the Strait of Hormuz.

This afternoon, Vice President J.D. Vance left for Switzerland to join the negotiations, but already Iran has indicated it intends to charge “insurance fees” for the ships going through the strait.

Trump appeared to try to pressure Iran by threatening to impose U.S. tolls on the strait if an agreement falls through. “There will be NO TOLLS in the Hormuz Strait for 60 days during the Cease Fire Period, and there will be NO TOLLS after the 60 day period has expired, unless they are imposed by and for the United States of America, should the deal not be completed, for services rendered as the Guardian Angel to the countries of the Middle East for purposes of both past, present, and future reimbursement of costs.”

That Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni of Italy is also refusing to go along with Trump’s narrative shows how Trump’s power is crumbling. A former ally, Meloni is now publicly contradicting Trump.

Earlier this week, Trump told an Italian television host that Meloni had “begged” for a picture with him at the G7 conference and that he “felt sorry for her.” Meloni said his comments were entirely “made up,” and the Italian foreign minister cancelled a trip to the United States over the flap.

Meloni highlighted the damage Trump has done to our alliances and indicated allies are done pretending his behavior is okay. “I don’t know why the US president behaves this way towards allies,” she wrote on Instagram. “I can only say it is regrettable he does not show the same determination towards the enemies of the West and towards the enemies of the US—[enemies] whose leaders he instead appears to be far more accommodating with. But there is one thing he needs to remember: neither I nor Italy ever beg.”

But Trump couldn’t let it go. This morning, he posted: “Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni asked, over and over, for a picture with me during the G-7 meeting in France. She is doing poorly in Italy with her level of popularity, possibly because she turned down the United States of America, a Country that truly loves and protects Italy, when it came to denying Iran from obtaining or developing a Nuclear Weapon (But so did NATO, for that matter!). She wouldn’t even let us use Italy’s landing strips or runways, a great logistical inconvenience, and this despite the fact the U.S. contributes hundreds of Billions of Dollars a year to protect Italy, and other “so-called” NATO Allies. Now, after the United States defeated Iran militarily, she wants to be friends again in order to get her “numbers up.” No thanks!!!”

Using a vulgar colloquialism, the headline on the front page of the Italian newspaper Libero today translated to “Trump is an a**hole.”

Today it appeared that the National Guard is patrolling the area around the reflecting pool. Tonight, Trump posted that “[m]any additional people have been arrested having to do with the disgraceful Vandalism of our beautiful Reflecting Pool.” The reflecting pool “worked perfectly, including the mirror like finish, perfectly reflecting the two Great Monuments, which it never had before! What these terrible Vandals have done is a true affront to both Presidents George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, and should be dealt with accordingly.”

Although multiple cameras line the mall and no one has offered any proof either of additional arrests or of vandalism, and although we have all been able to see workers dumping chemicals into the pool to kill the algae, Trump claimed that vandals “took some form of a knife or blade, and put a 250 foot long gash into the beautiful facade of what took so much work, competence, and money to build and complete. They also poured corrosive and destructive chemicals into the Pool.”

“The Reflecting Pool was never so beautiful as it was just one week ago, even going back to 1922 when it opened,” he wrote. “We are very proud of what we have done with this magnificent structure, and we will get it repaired, quickly, to an equal level of Beauty.”