David Hearn was chosen at random and put through the wringer for no reason, until cleared.
David Hearn was chosen at random and put through the wringer for no reason, until cleared.
R eaders, before we begin: a timeline of absurdity. In late April of this year, Trump proudly announced that he would be “refurbishing” the Reflecting Pool that sits outside the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. (It has long been choked with algal blooms and always turns green during the oppressively humid murk of D.C. summers.) The bottom of the pool would be coated with a Trump-approved layer of deluxe sealant, painted “American Flag Blue,” and infused with some newfangled “ozone nanobubbler” Trumptech just in time for the America 250 event Trump was hoping to celebrate in spectacular style on July 4.
And there those nattering nabobs of negativism in the press all were, poking at Trump’s vanity, telling the world that Trump had no idea what he was doing, what kind of physical and environmental obstacles made his idea of “fixing” the Reflecting Pool pure folly. (It’s really not much more complicated than the reality that the Reflecting Pool is a standing body of water set down in the middle of a swamp.) The haters said it couldn’t be done.
And by God, the haters were right. Excellent call, haters! You nailed it! Within a week or so of the pool’s grand June reopening, the water was once again green. (Trump is old enough to know, so he should have remembered the lesson from that old margarine ad: “It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature!”) What’s more, the resurfaced pool was now instantly flaking up and off the bottom, with entire panels sometimes coming unharnessed.
It was an obvious (and transparently predictable) humiliation for the Trump administration, with that extra dash of Trump pre-puffery to make the public mess that much more deliciously ironic. (Did Trump award no-bid contracts to his Mar-a-Lago buddies for the shoddy work? Of course he did.)
So what to do in response? What comes naturally: Trump demanded his administration start arresting people.
Yes, the official story has been — up until now — that the Reflecting Pool cleanup was in fact a Yuge Success, merely sabotaged after the fact by Trump-hating progressives, who oppose everything good and decent in America. These uniquely malevolent saboteurs were supposedly dumping algae into the pool and slashing up its bottom with knives and box cutters — all to hurt the glorious President Trump before America’s big patriotic anniversary.
Trump had made his allegations on Truth Social — so now it was the job of his flunkies to find people to prosecute, to justify his rant. They promptly arrested the most likely suspect: a 67-year-old Olympian canoeist named David Hearn. Hearn was biking through the Mall at the time, and after stopping to reach into the pool and bemusedly examine a piece of the peeling blue liner, he was arrested and charged with a felony count of destruction of property, with a potential ten-year sentence.
When the indictment came down, Trump acolyte and appointed U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro stood before the cameras to crow: “The evidence shows — we will prove beyond a reasonable doubt — that Hearn willfully destroyed property at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. This was a deliberate act to damage the reflecting pool.”
Well, maybe not. As of Friday, Pirro has summarily dropped all charges against Hearn, sheepishly claiming in her court filing that, as it turns out, the problems with the Reflecting Pool were “the result of a botched installation and not vandalism.” Pirro’s people are now claiming they were misled by Doug Burgum’s Interior Department, who goaded them into filing suit precipitously. And indeed, Burgum’s people were out there over the weekend on social media, dutifully covering themselves in shameful spin: “The evidence is clear, vandals have repeatedly caused damage to the Reflecting Pool. Some of these acts were even caught on camera.” (None of this is responsive to Pirro’s claims about this specific case.)
Of course, we know why everyone is backing and filling: The real reason these charges were overhastily fired in the first place was to provide a pleasing headline for Old King Donald to have read back to him the next morning on Fox News. Trump doesn’t care about dragging some random civilian into a spurious federal prosecution; in fact, he long ago confessed that he thrills at the idea of weaponizing the legal system against anyone he perceives as a personal enemy.
It’s no wonder that Trump himself spoke up on Saturday, to personally castigate Pirro for dropping the charges:
I disagree 100% with Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, on the Reflecting Pool. I don’t know what she was thinking? To me, it was a pure case of VANDALISM, that included the grass, which had a big 86 47 emblazoned in giant letters on it, and other elements of the surrounding area. There may have been some contractor difficulty, but the major damage was caused by VANDALS!
It was all contractor difficulty, and it should have been the oldest story in the book for a builder like Trump: He gave the job to those who gave him money and time and promised him quick work done on the cheap. He got what he (over-)paid for! And he can’t admit it, because he can’t “lose face” in public, just like he couldn’t admit his error with the Kennedy Center — or (whoops!) the Iran war that is gutting his presidency of its innards.
No, legal guilt is irrelevant in this case, as per usual with Trump in his Lear-like dotage: Guilty or not of the crime of vandalism, Hearn was guilty of accidentally attaching his name to a distinctly humiliating moment in a Trump presidency destined to be remembered as a sequence of them. For that unforgivable act of lèse-majesté, somebody had to burn. Hearn was chosen at random and put through the wringer for no reason, until cleared. And it will probably be enough to satiate Trump for now, because he got what he wanted: For Trump, getting to do that to someone provides its own satisfaction. The process is the punishment.
There will be no apologies.