Trump Keeps Finding New Targets to Blame for His Ridiculous Reflecting Pool Fiasco—and a Key Ally Is Now in His Sights

5 min read“There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot, dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks. Anything can happen.—Raymond Chandler, “Red Wind,” 1938Some Mondays are like drowning, drowning in a turbulent lagoon of sludge. The accumulated weirdness—and worse—of the previous weekend inundates reality and sweeps it away to God knows where until the current dies away and reality staggers to shore again. This Monday was one of those Mondays. To wit:Firstly, the president has taken to posting grotesque heroic memes of himself, including one in which he is sitting with George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, quill pens in hand, prompting the casual observer to speculate that Washington is composing his farewell address, Lincoln is polishing the Emancipation Proclamation, and the current president is cutting another check to Stormy Daniels. Still another showed the president in Continental Army drag leading the troops, which is the closest any male Trump has come to military service in four generations. The less said about the image that is half-Washington and half-Trump the better. It does, however, bring to mind another cinematic masterpiece.But the pièce de bedlam is a picture of the president deeply soul-kissing a golden crucifix in front of an American flag, an image so profoundly blasphemic that it would have turned Michelangelo into Oliver Cromwell. Note to the 25th Amendment—that boy ain’t right.The mayhem extended to the more devout members of the cult. U.S. attorney Jeanine Pirro’s decision to bail on the completely spurious prosecution of Olympic canoeist David Hearn for vandalism of the Reflecting Pool sent the president and the more devout members of the cult into orbit. From The Wall Street Journal:“I disagree 100% with Jeanine Pirro. I don’t know what she was thinking. To me, it was a pure case of VANDALISM.”Pirro blamed the company that got the no-bid contract to work on the reflecting pool and the Department of the Interior for leaving her with inadequate information. Secretary of the Interior, and former head of the petro-state of North Dakota, Doug Burgum clearly heard his master’s voice.“The evidence is clear, vandals have repeatedly caused damage to the Reflecting Pool. Some of these acts were even caught on camera,” Burgum wrote on social media. He said his department had provided Pirro’s office with “every piece of evidence they asked for in the requested time line detailing each area of damage at the pool.” Despite the dismissal, Burgum vowed that the administration “won’t back down to deranged people who want to destroy, deface, or degrade our monuments.” But nothing could top the appearance of HHS Secretary Robert F. (Roadkill) Kennedy on CNN, wherein he got in a shouting match with host Dana Bash. (Secretary Roadkill in full cry sounds like a cement mixer full of golf balls.) Forbes found an actual doctor to fact-check the secretary’s tirade. I admire Dr. Awan’s pluck.Secretary Kennedy also suggested that COVID-19 vaccines were not beneficial for children. In the interview, he emphatically asked, “Can you show me one study that shows that children were protected by the COVID vaccine?” There are many studies that have strongly demonstrated that COVID-19 vaccines decreased hospitalization and severe illnesses from COVID-19 for children and adolescents. In fact, a study published in the CDC’s own Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report showed the vaccine reduced the risk of emergency and urgency care visits for children 9 months to 4 years of age by 76 percent. In addition, the vaccine also reduced the risk of such visits for children between the ages of 5 to 17 by 56 percent.The interview also revisited the long-debunked question of vaccines and autism. When discussing the issue, Kennedy stated to Bash, “You are wrong when you say this issue has been studied.” In fact, this has been one of the most extensively studied questions in modern medicine, and decades of research across multiple countries and millions of individuals have unequivocally asserted that vaccines do not cause autism. For example, a 2025 Danish study that involved more than 1 million children found no link between vaccines and autism.Another notable exchange centered on the current measles outbreak, in which nearly 2,400 children have been diagnosed with measles this year, the most in more than three decades. Kennedy denied responsibility for the outbreak while arguing that pandemic disruptions contributed to lower vaccination rates. This is partly true as the COVID-19 pandemic did interrupt routine childhood immunizations worldwide, leading to millions of missed vaccine doses—approximately 23 million, according to UNICEF. However, that explanation alone is incomplete. Measles outbreaks occur when vaccination rates fall below herd immunity rates of 95 percent. Vaccine hesitancy, misinformation and declining MMR vaccination rates have all contributed to the outbreak in the U.S., with less than 1 percent of cases being imported into the U.S. internationally. As Kennedy has spent years questioning vaccine efficacy before becoming HHS Secretary, this messaging from an extremely influential health leader may have also contributed to vaccine hesitancy and declining vaccination rates.Please impeach this lunatic now before something more serious breaks out.Elsewhere, we were treated to another performance of the We’ll Kill You Dead/Let’s Talk It Out fandango in Iran, with bone-saw enthusiast MBS in a cameo appearance.And it was revealed that the president was suspected in a massive money-laundering operation involving Capitol One bank. From Reuters:Capital One Financial (COF.N) hit back on Friday against a lawsuit over its decision to close ‌the Trump Organization’s bank accounts years ago, stating that it did so after a review by anti-money laundering experts. The disclosure marks the first time a bank has formally tied money laundering concerns to U.S. President Donald Trump’s family business. Capital One is seeking to dismiss ​the case by casting doubt on claims of illegally debanking—or denying services on religious or political grounds—the Trump Organization. Capital One has never accused the Trump Organization of illegal money laundering. But Friday’s filing argues that “documents and Plaintiffs’ own ​allegations make clear that Capital One closed Plaintiffs’ accounts for anti-money laundering (“AML”) reasons. The closures were the result of months ​of analysis and a careful review by Capital One’s AML team in accordance with bank policies and regulatory guidance.” Capital One gave notice of its plans to close more than 300 Trump-affiliated bank accounts in March 2021. The Trump Organization and Eric Trump, the president’s son, filed ​a lawsuit in March 2025 in a Florida federal court, alleging the accounts were closed because of Capital One’s “woke” ​beliefs and its desire to benefit from the political mood after the January 6, 2021 riot at the U.S. Capitol.This is beautiful. Eric the Simple files one of the family’s traditional papier-mâché lawsuits, and the result is that the president and the phrase “money laundering” repeatedly appear in the same sentence.Jesus, take the wheel.