Trump’s Reflecting Pool is a Fetid Swamp. His Iran Deal Wishes it was That Good.

He spent $13 million trying to “fix” a 100-year-old problem and made it worse. He ran the exact same play on the Iran Nuclear Deal, only that one costs a lot more.

It’s officially summer in Washington, D.C. The sun is shining, the South Lawn has been freshly sprinkled with the teeth of UFC fighters, and the iconic Reflecting Pool has gone from a vibrant shade of green to a vibrant shade of green.

One of Trump’s pet projects has failed spectacularly: his attempt to fix the notoriously leaky and algae-riddled Reflecting Pool while improving on the 100 year-old design by installing a cheap pool liner in “American Flag Blue” backfired. The water has instantly turned bright green, thanks to an out-of-control algal bloom.

Now, in fairness, this is a problem that didn’t start with him. Previous administrations had devoted time, money, and care to trying to fix it. But it proved challenging, with root causes that go all the way back to its design in 1922. Despite best efforts, no one had effectively solved it. The Obama Administration put $34 million into rehabbing the pool, shoring it up for a few years at least.

But the putrid Reflecting Pool problem isn’t the only Obama era challenge Trump has attempted to solve this week— only to make it much, much worse. Much like the crumbling lining of the Reflecting Pool, details from Trump’s Iran deal have leaked, and it’s a mess.

Trump announced on Sunday, as a birthday present to himself, that a deal had been reached and that the war was finally (for the 12th time) over. This deal would be the best deal, better than any deal that has ever been made, and certainly completely different from the Iran Nuclear Deal negotiated under Obama in 2015, which Trump himself destroyed.

But here at the end of a completely unnecessary war of choice that no one wanted — that still, Congress has never approved — Trump has put the US in a far worse position than it was in before, and Iran in a better one than ever.

Essentially what it leaves us with is a more extreme Iranian government: more repressive, more anti-West. Iran will reportedly gain access to a $300+ billion fund to tap for reconstruction. And Iran now knows that it can use the Strait of Hormuz - through which a significant portion of the global oil supply passes on a daily basis - as leverage at will. In other words, Iran walks away with a playbook to hold the world economy hostage whenever it so chooses.

*

Trump inherited a flawed Reflecting Pool that had been shored up over and over again, but it was always on shaky ground. DC is a swamp, and the ground beneath the pool has been constantly shifting, cracking the infrastructure and causing it to leak up to 16 million gallons per year at some points. Despite Trump’s assurances that his proposed fix would be both cheaper and better, what he ended up doing cost almost seven times more than he initially promised, and has been an utter disaster. On top of the over $14 million it cost to make a historic landmark look exactly the same as my grandma’s in-ground pool on Long Island, Trump now has to drop another $1.7 million on a system to clean up the mess he made. Naturally, he found a way to frame this as “not his fault,” by rebranding the algae as “Biden’s filth.”

This new Iran Deal is just another transparent rebranding effort. Trump couldn’t stand to have a deal in place that bore Obama’s name. So he tore it up, and launched a war just so that he could slap his name on a similar – re: worse – deal. But what we’re left with is a deal so incomplete and inadequate, it’s already turning green before our eyes.