The Felon Can’t Spin His Way Out of His Messes

The Felon lies incessantly and typically tries to spin matters so as to avoid taking responsibility for poor decisions/actions or to sow doubt about criticism in the minds of his Kool-Aid drinking followers. While those in touch with objective reality see the Felon's statements and claims for what they are - outright lies - too often the MAGA base embraces the spin and lies rather than admit they have been played for fools.   With the reflecting pool debacle and the war of choice in Iran, the Felon is discovering that efforts to spin the situations - e.g., trying to blame the reflecting pool mess on vandalism - simply are not working in large part because everyone (i) everyone can see the horrible state of the reflecting pool (which was done on a no bid basis by one of the Felon's disreputable cronies) and (ii) the daily news coverage of the Iran war makes it obvious that the Felon's claims of "victory" or "winning" simply are untrue.  I suspect on the Iran war, the Iranian regime will drag out negotiations all the way up to the mid-term elections with the goal of hanging the war around Republicans' necks and undermining the Felon's already dwindling support.  A piece at The Atlantic looks at the Felon's efforts to spin the fiascos he personally set in motion:

[The Felon] President Trump spent the weekend trying to calm the waters in Washington and roil them in the Persian Gulf.

Let’s begin with the less serious of these two self-inflicted crises. This spring, Trump for some reason became fixated on the Reflecting Pool on the National Mall, which had not previously been a topic of national discussion, but which he believes should vibrate with a deep Technicolor blue. The administration awarded no-bid contracts for both a color coating and a new water-purification system, with the latter going to a company tied to a Trump-campaign donor previously convicted of conspiracy to bribe. Surprising no one, both parts of the project have been a disaster.

Now Trump says water will likely have to be removed from the pool to do “necessary repairs”—in other words, $16.4 million in taxpayer money will go down the drain. . . . . He also blamed vandals for the issues, though the White House has offered no evidence to suggest that’s true. Visitors who approached the pool this weekend were shooed away by National Guard members, and at least one who touched the pool’s broken liner was arrested . . .

Meanwhile, Trump nearly upended peace negotiations between Vice President Vance and Iranian leaders in Switzerland. Over the weekend, Iran claimed it had once more blocked the Strait of Hormuz because of fighting between Israel and Hezbollah, which appears to violate the fragile cease-fire in place. Whether the strait is actually closed is not entirely clear . . . On Truth Social, he said that if Iran didn’t rein in Hezbollah, he would “hit Iran very hard again, just like we did last week, only harder!!!”

Threatening to kill interlocutors in the middle of a peace negotiation is generally seen as uncouth, in addition to counterproductive. Today, Vance was left to tell the Iranians that, in essence, they should just write off his threats as bluster: “What we told the Iranians yesterday is that when you guys engage in what us Millennials might call trash talk, you can’t expect the president of the United States not to respond and not to correct the record.”

Like Trump’s repeated blaming of vandals for damaging the pool, Trump is talking, but no one’s really paying much attention. Iran seems to have already concluded that it doesn’t need to take Trump seriously, which is a mixed blessing: good because it meant the Iranians didn’t quit the negotiations, but bad for the prospects of the U.S. reaching a favorable deal.

The Iran war and the Reflecting Pool, though very different in scale and importance, share some illuminating parallels. In both cases, Trump embarked on a project while blaming the Obama administration, his persistent bugbear, for an alleged problem: Iranian aggression or an insufficiently azure pool. In both cases, he charged forward without a fleshed-out plan, preferring to fly by the seat of his pants, and ignored the experts who warned of exactly the problems that resulted—algal blooms, a blocked strait.

What sets Iran and the Reflecting Pool apart from some previous cases is that he has been unable to deny reality. In the past, Trump has spun setbacks as victories, lying prodigiously to do so. In the case of his bogus claim of a stolen 2020 election, for example, he has relied on generalized public distrust of institutions, robust conservative media, and the arcana of election procedure to help create at least some doubt.

But no one can deny that the Reflecting Pool is, in fact, currently green. Nor can Trump spin the war in Iran—not when Americans spent weeks filling up their cars with gas that spiked well above $4 a gallon, and not when ships are visibly bottled up in the strait. These failures are plain in a way that exceeds even Trump’s capacity to get his supporters to believe him over their own eyes.

Now Trump’s only recourse is trying again, almost certainly with worse results. Vance is celebrating a tentative agreement to merely restore nuclear inspections—a safeguard present in Obama’s hated deal with Iran—even as the U.S. makes concessions such as allowing Iran to sell more oil. Trump badly wants the Reflecting Pool fixed by July 4, but it’s unclear if that is possible; if it is, doing so will almost certainly cost millions more in taxpayer money. The president chose two unnecessary battles and lost them both, and the American people will pay.