But Trump’s funhouse mirrors may be shattering
After Jeanine Pirro, his handpicked U.S. Attorney for Washington, D.C., contradicted Donald J. Trump in a court filing about the Reflecting Pool, the president insisted she was wrong. On social media he blasted “the major damage was caused by VANDALS.”
As a review of the 20-page motion seeking the dismissal of charges against former Olympian David Hearn shows, Pirro offered substantial evidence to the contrary. “[I]nformation show[s] that the damage” to the Reflecting Pool “was the result of a botched installation and not vandalism as initially represented” by the Department of the Interior, the U.S. Attorney and an assistant told the court in their July 31 filing.
Quite the turnabout.
Pirro and a colleague added that “additional documents” provided by the department “indicat[ed] that damage to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in June 2026 was the result of flawed installation by the contractor, Atlantic Industrial Coatings (‘AIC’), and the rush to complete the project prior to events associated with the America 250 celebration in the weeks surrounding Independence Day 2026.”
Despite the detailed, photo-laden filing, Trump insisted that his appointee was wrong. “I disagree 100% with Jeanine Pirro,” he said in a post on Truth SociaI. “I don’t know what she was thinking? To me, it was a pure case of VANDALISM ….”
Recall that Trump picked Pirro to serve in the D.C. jurisdiction because of her work as a legal analyst and program host for Fox, as well as her experience as a county judge in Westchester, N.Y., and three-term district attorney. Her credits also include working as a writer and producer for TV’s “Law & Order,” along with some acting experience.
Clearly Trumpworthy.
Certainly, Pirro played her part well on July 2, when she announced the indictment against Hearn, who had dipped his hand in the Reflecting Pool while on a bike ride. She called the vandalism “an affront to the dignity of our shared history.” Insisting it was a day of “accountability,” Pirro said Hearn made “a deliberate act to damage the Reflecting Pool” and alleged that he did so “forcefully and violently,” adding that “we can state and prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he caused damage and that damage is over $1,000.”
My, how her script changed. No more shooting from the lip.
In the dismissal motion, she said new information from the Department of the Interior made it clear that “[t]he rush to complete the project led to hasty and botched work that was not remediated before the project was finished and the fencing removed.” Perhaps the even hastier work, though, was Pirro’s Trump-pleasing indictment of Hearn less than two weeks after the 67-year-old cyclist touched a loose piece of the pool’s liner on his June 19 ride.
But Pirro’s pirouette wasn’t the most disconcerting thing about the episode. Rather, that was Trump’s inability to admit that Hearn was wrongfully charged. Psychologists have a term for that: it’s “willful ignorance.” This is a state in which people realize at some level that their beliefs are probably false OR they refuse to attend to information that would establish their falsity.
No matter how much information contradicts the willfully ignorant, they just can’t see things any other way but their distorted – or simply wrong – way, seeing the world in a funhouse mirror. Or, if they are just liars, they will stick to their guns, even while knowing they’ve misfired.
We see this repeatedly with Trump, whose penchant for lying is well-established. He does so convincingly – at least to his MAGA devotees – perhaps because he believes his own lies. Self-deception is a key part of Trump’s flawed psyche, according to his niece clinical psychologist Mary L. Trump.
And this has had tragic consequences.
When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu persuaded Trump that an attack on Iran would be swiftly followed by public uprisings to oust the mullahs, Trump disregarded the views of American intelligence agencies. In February, about a week before the men launched their attacks, the U.S. National Intelligence Council had concluded that neither limited airstrikes nor a larger, prolonged military campaign would be likely to result in a new government taking over in Iran.
The prospect of Iran’s fragmented opposition taking control of the country was described as “unlikely,” according to sources quoted anonymously by several outlets including The Washington Post. As the paper reported, the council is composed of veteran analysts who produce classified assessments meant to represent the collective wisdom of Washington’s 18 intelligence agencies.
American military leaders also waved the yellow caution flag. During a Feb. 18 meeting, General John “Dan” Caine listed options including a) a limited strike as a way to push Iran in the negotiations or b) larger campaign with the goal of toppling the government, as The New York Times reported. The second option, the general warned, carried high risk of American casualties, could destabilize the region and significantly deplete stocks of American munitions.
Since Trump chose option B, at least 14 American soldiers have been killed and 624 wounded. And those figures may understate the tallies because the Pentagon has changed the way it counts and reports such numbers.
And now, of course, the five-month-old war drags on with Iranian leaders playing Trump like a fiddle. Recall that Trump claimed the U.S. and Israel “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear capabilities, but now his administration is still trying to cut a deal to keep nukes out of Iranian hands. And he has repeatedly threatened massive attacks, even while saying Iranians were begging for a deal.
Trump has often asserted that the U.S. and Israel destroyed Iran’s military capabilities. And yet the country still has the power to send missiles and drones into the territory of U.S. allies.
At the moment, Trump says he is holding off on a major assault he threatened, saying allies pleaded for diplomacy. But experts say he backed down because Iran now has the upper hand, mainly because it can use proxies such as the Houthis to threaten ships in the Red Sea and can bombard U.S. allies in the Persian Gulf.
Is willful ignorance driving him again? The most charitable face one can put on it is to blame disastrous miscalculation fueled by arrogance. And yet, with so many smart folks tapping the brakes, should he not have listened?
Then there’s the economy. At his recent very public Cabinet meeting, Trump bragged anew about his economic achievements, saying “… today, there are more people working in the United States than at any time in the history of our country” and that “… without the election, you wouldn’t have what I’ve done economically. So, we have the most successful environment that we’ve ever had.”
Never mind that in the second quarter of this year, growth in the economy slowed to a 1.5 percent rate, sharply down from the already modest 2.1 percent annual rate clocked in the year’s opening quarter. Or that the consumer price index rose 3.5 percent in June, compared with the same month last year. While that’s down from 4.2 percent in May, it still reflects inflation that is clipping along faster than the 2 percent rate the Federal Reserve wants.
That’s why the Fed is keeping interest rates as they are, not dropping them as Trump wants. And, even as the central bank has taken that stance, three regional bank presidents dissented, pressing for higher lending rates to rein in inflation.
But what do we and Trump hear from his key economic operator, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent? That sycophant, flattering the president along with the other Cabinet toadies, said “…we’re pulling away from the rest of the world because of your leadership, the policies that you did from day one in terms of digital assets, in terms of technology and bringing back American manufacturing. You’ve done it again.You had the incredible economy during your first term, and we are seeing that carry over here and it is in stark contrast to the Biden economy …”
Nary a word about the slowdown or the Fed concerns, which had made news nationwide. No mention of the decline in consumer spending or rising gas prices. Nothing about how a recent CNN poll found that 65 percent of Americans believe Trump’s policies have worsened economic conditions in the country, or that the president’s approval rating had fallen to 34 percent.
As the Los Angeles Times reported, a recent Pew Research Center survey found most Americans aren’t feeling great about the economy — with 24 percent rating economic conditions as excellent or good, 41 percent rating them as “only fair,” and 35 percent rating them as poor.
Combine willful ignorance with Trump’s astonishingly successful effort to surround himself with opportunistic yes-men, and you get suck-up Cabinet meetings like this past one.
Finally, consider the president’s fight with the Smithsonian Institution and other outfits that tell our national story. The president doesn’t want the best judgments of historians and experts to guide the national self-image, but rather his blinkered and ignorant views.
As a New York Times writer recalled, two months into his second term, Trump issued an executive order titled Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History, directing officials to “remove improper ideology” from the Smithsonian and its museums, to cut funding to “programs that degrade shared American values” and to reinstate some monuments removed following the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests.
Since then, the National Park Service has been removing signs about slavery; the statue of a Confederate general has been reinstalled in Washington; a scathing report by the White House Domestic Policy Council accused the Smithsonian of using history “as a political instrument to divide, dispirit and discourage our citizens”; and on July 24, Trump issued a new executive order mandating that signs be installed outside the Smithsonian. The signs warn visitors “about the ideological capture at the National Museum of American History.”
The Times writer, Moscow-born M. Gessen, compared the political effort to rewrite history to the constant rewrites of Russian history her countrymen have long endured.
“Trump wants Americans to unlearn what they have come to know about the history and legacy of enslavement,” Gessen wrote. “What his executive orders really promise to restore is a sense of comfort contained in the most reductive and sanitized stories about the United States — the bliss of ignorance.”
The bliss, perhaps, of willful ignorance.