America's Final Summer: How the Republic Died Over a July 4th Pool Project.

From an asymmetric surrender in Iran to a rotting reflection in D.C., competence has left the building.

Jun 22, 2026

The signs are right. You pass them all summer, 1776 - 2026, planted by people who think they are flying a birthday banner and are actually tending a headstone they cut themselves. They got the year right. They got everything else backward. That is the whole story of how the country died, and it died over a swimming pool. How perfectly July 4th American.

Here is the sentence the republic did not survive. The president of the United States went on television to show the country how well he could clean a pool, and proved he could not clean the pool.

The American people handed the most powerful office on earth to a man who cannot do the job we pay teenagers to do. Then the country looked at the green water and applauded the effort our make-a-wish president put into his failure. There is a name for what that makes us. A post-competence state, a place where the floor of doing a job, any job, has dropped out from under every office the country has, the highest one included, where the people in charge are not the ablest the system can find but the least, and where nobody is ashamed, because the part of the government that used to feel shame has been hollowed out too. This spring the president built a mirror by accident, fifteen million dollars and two acres of green water at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial.

He did not mean to build a mirror. He meant to change the subject. By June he was losing at all things the voters had pretended he was good at. The war he opened on Iran in February was curdling into a surrender. The price of everything was climbing and would not come down. The Rotting Orange needed a win the way a drowning man needs air, something easy, something with a flag on it, and he reached for the easiest patriotic prop in the country. He took the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, the long flat sheet of water laid between the monument and the steps where King said he had a dream, drained it, painted the bottom a color he named American flag blue, spent the fifteen million, and told the country to watch him do it. His own office called it a triumph before the water finished filling. Then, with the cameras he had summoned still rolling, the pool went the green of a forgotten fish tank in a single day.

You really do have to sit with that a bit, with what he chose. Cleaning a pool as his grand American project. It is not governance. It is the chore you pay to hand off so you are free to go and govern, a chemistry loop a teenager runs off a paper strip, chlorine against the algae, acid against the base, the numbers printed on the side of the bottle. I had a pool in Arizona, where the sun is crueler to standing water than anything in Washington, and the going rate in 2015 to make it someone else’s problem was about twenty-five dollars a week. So I paid it. The guy came out, dragged the net, read the strip, added what the strip told him, and left. Nobody needs the pool guy to be brilliant. He needs to keep the water clear. The president of the United States went looking for the lowest rung in American life, the one even the stoned kid with the net never misses, built a stage for it, summoned the world to watch, and fell straight through it into a steaming pile of his own slime.

The slime was expensive. One point eight million when it was pitched. Nearly fifteen when it was finished, eight times the number, to repaint a pool. A one point seven million dollar contract for a gadget called a nanobubbler went out with nobody allowed to bid, to a company run by John Cafaro, who handed a quarter of a million dollars to a Trump committee in 2020, who has pleaded guilty in federal court twice, once in 2002 for conspiring to bribe a congressman and again in 2010 for campaign finance crimes, and who lives less than a mile from Mar-a-Lago. To celebrate the achievement the president posted a fake photograph of himself and his cabinet lounging in swim trunks beside a bikini model, in the green pool the public had just been charged fifteen million dollars to ruin.

It was not only him, which is how you know it is the state and not the man. The Interior Department looked at a pool the color of a swamp and could not decide whether it was algae. The Park Service, sent to fix it, poured bottles of hydrogen peroxide into the water, and the brand-new paint began sloughing off the bottom while they watched. The cure ate the thing the money bought. This is a government that cannot identify algae, cannot kill it without stripping the floor out from under itself, and cannot buy a jug of pool chemical without laundering the check through a two-time felon. The rot is not in the Oval Office. It is in the water table. It is the whole grounds. The rot is American life.

In order to understand the full incompetence of this story, you really have to look at what the green water was built to hide, because the war belongs in this reflection too. He kept renaming it. It was about Iran’s nuclear program, until it was about the protesters Iran had massacred, until it was regime change, until it was freeing the Iranian people, until it was seizing their oil the way he wanted to seize Venezuela’s.

Then he signed his name to a surrender that delivered none of it. Iran is still enriching, and is back to the same never-build-a-weapon pledge he tore up Obama’s deal to escape. The regime did not fall, it passed from the Supreme Leader he assassinated to that man’s own son. The oil he swore to seize, he is now signing waivers to help them sell. The people he came to liberate got thousands dead, millions driven from their homes, and the worst inflation Iran has seen since 1942, and the paper he put his name to commits the United States to at least three hundred billion dollars to rebuild the country he just finished bombing. Every reason he gave, failed. The war achieved one measurable thing. It set the price of everything in America on fire, gas back over four dollars, ground beef up twelve percent in a year, the inflation number up to 4.2, the strategic petroleum reserve scraped to its lowest level since 1983.

So when the water told the truth in front of the cameras anyway, he did the last thing a post-competence state knows how to do. He arrested the truth. They took David Hearn, a three-time Olympian, whose crime was bending to touch a strip of blue paint that had already peeled off on its own, and then saying what he saw. They named the reporter, Jonathan Karl, who had filmed himself working another loose flap back and forth to prove on camera that it was loose. In the movie everyone reaches for to describe us, the idiots at least listen to the one man who can still read and water the dying crops with water. We are past that now. Here the man who points at the dying field is the one who goes to jail.

People keep saying America needs to take a long, hard look at itself, as if the trouble were that we had not gazed deeply enough into some pond. That is not the trouble. The reflection is not hiding. The reflection is a man in the Oval Office too stupid to clean a pool and too stupid to know it, a government beneath him that cannot tell algae from sabotage, a war fought to disarm an enemy that left it armed and richer, a grocery bill no one in charge can read or lower. You do not need to look harder. It is the most obvious thing in the country. A post-competence state spent fifteen million dollars and a whole summer of cameras building a monument to its own stupidity, and then could not work out why the water turned green.

So go down to the Reflecting Pool now, the long sheet of water we built to carry the face of Lincoln, and look in. You will not see Lincoln. You will not see your own face. You will see the only honest reflection of the country left in Washington. A swamp. Run by idiots, elected by idiots, men who cannot keep a pool clean and will have robbed the country blind before the slime is even dry. He promised to drain the swamp. He drained a pool and grew a swamp in its place, fifteen million dollars deep, at the feet of Lincoln.

America, 1776 to 2026. It was a good run.

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Patrick | Complex Simplicity

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