Democratic darling Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called out Donald Trump for his predictable fiasco at the Reflecting Pool.
The 80-year-old president has lashed out at imaginary saboteurs as his $14 million renovation of the Reflecting Pool spiraled into disaster, with paint chips flaking off and algae taking over the water.
But Ocasio-Cortez said the outcome of the project was not at all surprising given how the Trump administration defunded hundreds of millions of dollars into research.
“I mean, when you defund science research, when you don’t really understand the first thing about science, yeah, they talked a bunch of smack,” she told Meidas Touch.
She also bluntly stated that Trump has turned D.C. into a literal swamp, despite his repeated promises to “drain” the metaphorical swamp.
“They said they had to repaint the pool, and now they’ve turned the place into a swamp,” she said. “They turned it into an actual swamp.”
Trump has grown obsessive over the disaster unfolding at the Reflecting Pool.
His administration has sent workers to attempt to offset the algal bloom by physically removing the algae and pouring hydrogen peroxide into the water. But as they were doing that, the “American flag blue” paint started flaking off the bottom and floating to the surface of the pool.
Trump has tried to blame the shoddy renovation on anonymous vandals, claiming they committed very serious crimes and will spend “years in jail!”
He has claimed that vandals used a “knife or blade” to tear a “gash” into the pool’s sealant, but his description of the gash has gone from 250 feet to 300 feet to 350 feet as he raged on Truth Social.
Neither the president nor the White House has provided any evidence for these claims.
In May, however, Trump proclaimed that the renovated Reflecting Pool would be impossible to cut.
“This will last for at least 50 years,” Trump said on May 4. “You’ll never have a leak. It’s very strong. You couldn’t, if you had a knife—I don’t want to give anybody ideas—if you had a knife, you can’t even cut it. So strong, so powerful, it’s like powerful rubber. It is beautiful. Sealed.”
Still, the president has gone forth with his sabotage fantasy. On Sunday, he claimed that he had “inspected” the pool, and said it would need to be drained once again to fix the damage.
“Work will begin immediately on fixing the seriously vandalized Reflecting Pool. I just inspected it, and could only say to myself, and those gathered around me, WOW, who would do such a thing?” Trump wrote. “SICK, DERANGED PEOPLE! We will fix it?”
There are now several large fences around the Reflecting Pool, seemingly meant to hide the murky water from the public, and law enforcement agents have been seen berating people who even put their hands in the water.
