It will come as little surprise that the $14,700,000 “repair” of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool was the product of two failures. The first was the typical Trump rush to get this “signature” fix completed before the 250th anniversary festivities to celebrate Trump’s greatness, without adequate planning or competent performance. The no-bid contractor, that Trump either knew well or didn’t know at all according to which day he was asked, admitted that it blew the job. At least Atlantic Industrial Coatings is redoing its failed repairs under warranty, as the Reflecting Pool remains empty.

The second failure was Trump’s immediate resort to fabricating a lie to excuse his failure, because puny yet shameless people are incapable of admitting error. Rather than acknowledge that the self-proclaimed master builder might have been at fault, Trump insisted, and persisted in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that it couldn’t have been him, so it had to be radical left lunatics who took a box cutter to the American Flag Blue lining to cut a 100 250 300 350 foot gash in the lining, thus precluding any effort to correct the failing in favor of blaming his enemies.

All it took was arresting and prosecuting innocent people to make the lie believable. Even Jeanine Pirro, Trump’s adoring United States Attorney for the District of Columbia, who would have happily backed up Trump’s shameless claims if there were any way she could get away with it, recognized that there was no possibility of maintaining a prosecution in the face of the contractor’s reports that the job was a complete botch.

The contractor that renovated the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool has told the Trump administration that errors in its own work and flaws in the repair plan, not vandalism, caused the pool’s new blue liner to peel and break loose, according to government documents reviewed by The New York Times.

But the documents, which have not previously been reported, make clear that the contractor, Atlantic Industrial Coatings, found problems in both the design and the execution of the renovation. The documents include Atlantic’s reports to the government as well as daily progress updates from the National Park Service over the past two months.

Trump kept insisting that there were pictures, as there would have had to have been given that there were cameras around the pond, although somehow no pictures ever appeared. Like so many claims of evidence, ranging from the stolen 2020 election to the Haitians eating cats and dogs, there was nothing beyond Trump saying so. Finally, a picture has emerged.

Salwan Georges for The New York Times

The image, of course, is of a worker ripping up the failed lining, the same lining that had failed almost immediately and which visitors to the Reflecting Pond occasionally knelt and touched after it had already failed and was flapping about in the water.

Why it doesn’t seem to trouble the MAGA faithful that their savior has no relationship to reality is one thing. Perhaps if they would put half the effort into facing the truth that they put into making excuses for laughably obvious lies, they would have a better grasp of what’s going wrong with Trump’s myriad schemes. But then, that assumes they want to know, they care at all about a president who will lie shamelessly as long as he expresses his hatred of those they hate.

But even if they truly care nothing about lies and schemes, about flagrant corruption and blatant self-aggrandizement, what about prosecuting the innocent to bolster the lies? Are they good with former Olympic canoeist David Hearn being sacrificed for Team Trump? To make the lie work, they needed a warm body to prosecute and nabbed the first one they could pretend did the dirty?

It’s relatively harmless for Trump to pretend his midterm “convention” was a sellout despite the many pictures of a half-empty auditorium, or even that two manly firefighters lifted Trump out of the rubble by his arms to save him after 9/11. Lies for sure, but lies that only serve to save Trump from humiliation or steal the valor of those who sacrificed their mental and physical health to salvage the bodies of their brethren.

But other lies, like claiming Iranian missiles did no harm when they destroyed American fighters or that American sailors on the USS Lincoln weren’t suffering for the excesses of their deployment to back up Trump’s war of choice for which he has no way out, or that tariffs are paid for foreign corporations, cause real harm to real people. The nonsensical claim that the failure of the repairs to the Reflecting Pool were caused by vandals, regurgitated countless times by Trump, caused real harm to the Americans arrested and prosecuted for crimes that only happened in Trump’s fertile imagination as he desperately searched for an excuse that would absolve him of blame.

We found the vandal. It wasn’t David Hearn.