Trump's Poolish Crime

Reflecting badly, plus today's cartoons, Patti visits Pope, Simpsons "Once" upon a time///

Aug 01, 2026

Still free to subscribe to this nearly daily newsletter! Greg Mitchell is author of fourteen books and director of five films for PBS since 2022. In a previous life, he was a longtime editor at the legendary Crawdaddy. His latest film “Woody Guthrie and The Ghost of Tom Joad Today” is now streaming everywhere via PBS.

Of course our story of the day has to be Trump’s Dead Pool lies and legal case and what should be humiliation enough to drive him out of office (but won’t). From NY Times:

Federal prosecutors on Friday said that contractors hired by the Trump administration had botched the renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, leaving behind “widespread damage” in the pool’s new blue lining, and that the Interior Department had then falsely blamed that damage on vandals.
In an extraordinary motion filed Friday evening, the U.S. attorney in Washington, Jeanine Pirro, said she was seeking to dismiss a felony charge against David Hearn, a former Olympic canoeist who was accused of pulling up a piece of the pool’s lining two feet square.
In doing so, Ms. Pirro — a longtime ally of President Trump’s — directly contradicted the president’s repeated claim that the Reflecting Pool’s peeling liner was caused by people slashing its coating with knives. Instead, she said, “the damage was the result of a botched installation and not vandalism.”
Earlier this month, Ms. Pirro herself had echoed the president’s claims, calling a news conference to announce Mr. Hearn’s indictment on July 2. She said that she had “tremendous evidence” that Mr. Hearn had committed a felony, and noted that he faced up to 10 years in prison.

With the Miller-Moreno wife and child abuse scandal still enlarging in Ohio, an explanation, in its way, from The Hill:

More than half of MAGA voters say they would support a Republican candidate accused of sexual assault, according to a new poll.
In a recent Politico poll, 66 percent of MAGA voters who cast their ballot for President Trump in his last contest for the White House said they would back a GOP candidate even if “a former partner has accused the Republican candidate of sexual assault” rather than support the Democratic candidate in a hypothetical congressional race.
Twenty-five percent of the MAGA voters said they would not cast their ballot for either candidate in the same hypothetical race, while 9 percent of the same group said they would cast their ballot for the Democrat.

Meanwhile, from Heather Cox Richardson:

Today Trump disagreed with the assessment of investigators that a recent cyberattack on municipal water systems in Minnesota was likely the work of Iranian hackers. Instead, he blamed Democrats.
“We heard in Minnesota there was a cyberattack and they blame it on Iran,” he told reporters. “I don’t think so. I think. I blame it on Minnesota because they’re grossly incompetent. There was a cyberattack of thirty water plants. And I would blame it on Minnesota and the governor, the corrupt governor of Minnesota.”
There is another piece of evidence this week that the abandonment of education and expertise in favor of a “warrior ethos” has weakened the U.S. on the world stage. At an international conference on AIDS in Rio de Janeiro, an official of the U.S. State Department showed a map of Africa on which six fake countries were identified with the names of random real countries—including Nigeria, where several hundred U.S. soldiers are deployed. Reuters identified the image as AI.