A White House reporter learned a hard lesson Thursday about asking the obvious. An ABC News correspondent thought she had Trump on the ropes when she questioned why the administration is renovating the Reflecting Pond near the Lincoln Memorial and Washington Monument. It didn’t go the way she planned.
Trump wasn’t having it. “It’s such a stupid question that you ask,” he fired back. “We’re fixing up the Reflecting Pond to the Lincoln Memorial, the Washington Monument, and you say, ‘Why are you fixing it up?'” He then went for the jugular: “Because you can understand dirt maybe better than I can — but I don’t allow it.”
That last line is the whole story. The media spent years watching the National Mall fall into disrepair and said nothing. Now that someone is actually cleaning it up, they want answers. Trump’s answer: no.
This is what the press corps has become — reporters so conditioned to finding the scandal that they can’t recognize a straightforward improvement project when it’s staring them in the face. Fixing a landmark pond isn’t a controversy. Asking why it’s being fixed, with that tone, in that room, is just embarrassing. Trump said what most people watching were already thinking.