Never in my life have I rooted so hard for algae. In fact, I’ve never rooted for algae at all. Yet the sight of those tiny green organisms floating in the Reflecting Pool, absorbing sunlight, multiplying their little hearts out and living their best (presumably very short) lives, fills me with joy.Among the Trump administration’s many debacles, the greening of the Reflecting Pool is uniquely delightful. Every other Donald Trump farce contains elements of tragedy. Whatever schadenfreude we might otherwise feel from the president’s haphazard “Liberation Day” tariffs or cycle of threat and submission toward Iran is leavened with concern or even horror for the collateral damage. We feel bad for our country, however tremendous the content may be.The Reflecting Pool episode captures most of Trump’s governing pathologies (corruption, incompetence, authoritarian menace, absurd lies) without any of the normal attendant consequences. It is pure, meaningless fun.Meaningless to everybody, that is, except Trump.[Read: Science has a name for what’s plaguing the Reflecting Pool]Starting in April, the president began to boast, over and over, about his renovations. The new pool would be “beautiful,” “incredible.” The president had the foresight to line the bottom with a sealant that would last at least 50 years, perhaps 100. He showed reporters a chart depicting the pool dwarfing skyscrapers in size (if you laid the skyscrapers on their side, which obviates their most impressive attribute). This was a strange subject to obsess about in the midst of a war, yet the president’s enthusiasm for the topic seemed contagious. MAGA accounts on social media gloried in the incredible triumph of turning the pool blue.But soon green algae appeared on the water. Workers were dispatched to pour bottles of hydrogen peroxide into the basin. The impermeable sealant began peeling off, possibly because of substandard quality, or perhaps because hydrogen peroxide is used as a paint stripper.Reporters discovered that Trump had given no-bid contracts for the painting and water filtration. The task of turning the water clear had been entrusted to a firm improbably called Greenwater Services. Its owner, John J. Cafaro, has an appearance that Trump would describe as “central casting,” if the script called for No-Bid Contractor No. 1 to hand a stuffed envelope to Tony Soprano. Cafaro is a Trump donor, has been praised as a “fantastic man” by the president himself, and, unsurprisingly, has one prior conviction for conspiring to bribe an elected official (not Trump).Incompetence by cronies seems like a plausible hypothesis for the failure. But to question the quality of the work would be to question Trump himself. And so the president responded in the characteristic fashion he employs in the face of all setbacks, especially self-created ones.He blamed the failure on sabotage by unnamed enemies: vandals undermining his great project. Even though Trump had previously boasted that the new floor was impenetrable—“If you had a knife, you can’t even cut it. So strong, so powerful”—and even though it was constantly surrounded by witnesses with cameras, these vandals had somehow managed to cut it open. “They took some form of 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,” he wrote Saturday on Truth Social. “They also poured corrosive and destructive chemicals into the Pool.”By Monday morning, Trump claimed, in another post, that the gash was 300 feet long. When he met with reporters in the Oval Office on Monday afternoon, the gash had grown to 350 feet, and rather than having poured “corrosive and destructive chemicals” into the beautiful water, the vandals had done something quite different from, and close to the opposite of, that. “Somebody said they might have put fertilizer. They did something to create the algae,” he explained.Trump told the press that he had photographic evidence of these astonishing crimes. When a reporter asked to see it, he demurred, “At the right time, you’ll see it. You’ll see it in court,” expressing a heretofore-absent reluctance to taint a judicial proceeding with pretrial publicity.[Read: What color is the Reflecting Pool? An investigation.]Simultaneous to Trump’s loud and repeated insistence that he had uncovered a secret plot to deface his precious pool, the administration and its supporters began complaining that the news media was devoting too much attention to the subject. “ABC News is tougher on Trump about algae in the reflecting pool than they were on Biden about his disastrous exit from Afghanistan that cost American soldiers’ lives,” claimed the American Compass managing editor Drew Holden. “Legacy media would rather report on algae than anything that actually matters to the American people,” wrote The Federalist.Apparently it was the liberal media, not Trump, that had turned the Reflecting Pool into a symbol of Trump’s agenda, while Trump himself was focused on weightier matters. U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro warned the ABC News reporter Jonathan Karl, who had stuck his hands into the pool to reveal the fraying surface liner, that he might “face the criminal justice system” for “attempting to vandalize” the pool.Police arrested David Hearn, a former Olympian canoeist, on Friday for touching the once-impermeable lining. The pool is now surrounded by agents from the U.S. Park Police and the mobilized National Guard, who probably never anticipated that their tour of duty would be to safeguard a tiny, landlocked body of water. I hope our troops succeed in this mission.At the same time, I would like nothing more than for the pool to turn green and fetid. The administration’s more damaging yet abstract failures do not provide the satisfying metaphorical bluntness of the centerpiece of Trump’s visual propaganda becoming, literally, a swamp.