The Once-Shameless President Is Deeply Embarrassed - The Atlantic

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Sign up for Inside the Trump Presidency, a newsletter featuring coverage of the second Trump term.<br>One of President Trump’s superpowers is his shamelessness. Most of the time, he demonstrates a singular ability to shrug off—or flat-out lie about—scandals or missteps that would have caused another politician’s career to self-immolate. Get caught on an Access Hollywood video boasting about abusing women? That’s just locker-room talk! Grow insecure about crowd size? The photo must be doctored! Mistakenly suggest that Alabama was in the path of a hurricane? Someone get a Sharpie and a map! Trump has long been able to shrug off a bad headline and move on to the next news cycle, counting on his base to swallow his claims and never waver in their support.<br>But that power appears to be fading. Trump is undeniably in a bad spot. His poll numbers have tumbled, and Republicans are fearful that they will lose at least one chamber of Congress this November. Trump’s behavior has grown more erratic in recent months—just check out his Truth Social account most nights—and he recently marked his 80th birthday. And lately, he has shown something else: an ability to be embarrassed. When that has happened, he has lashed out angrily—and has been willing to deploy the levers of government, and his compliant staff, to menace those he blames for his humiliation.<br>His recent targets include an Olympic canoeist accused of vandalizing the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool after a rushed and botched renovation project, and journalists who reported about the security deficiencies of Trump’s new Air Force One. In the first matter, he pushed for a prosecution after an arrest was made; in the other, he ordered a criminal investigation. (The case against the canoeist and other alleged vandals fell apart, and the subpoenas of the journalists have been dropped, at least for the moment.)<br>For months now, Trump has been on the receiving end of another humiliation: He has been repeatedly mocked and ignored by the hard-line leaders in Iran. Once more this week, the president reacted with rage when Iran again contradicted his claims about negotiations to bring the war to a close. How will he lash out this time?<br>Trump really, really does not want to be forgotten, and he cares deeply about leaving his physical mark on Washington. He is a developer at heart who spent decades obsessing over the details of his homes in Manhattan and Palm Beach while also overseeing the design of luxury golf courses around the world. He mostly kept that impulse in check during his first term, but now, facing his political mortality, he has decisively shifted his focus to his legacy, whether that be trying to claim territory for the United States or reshaping the nation’s capital. You know the list: the East Wing, the Rose Garden, the Kennedy Center, the arch, the municipal golf courses, a helipad on the White House South Lawn, and so on. Trump has long prized symbols—particularly when the symbols can project his power—and seized upon America’s 250th birthday as an opportunity to further beautify Washington, his backdrop as he presided over the grandiose celebrations. His attention was particularly drawn to the Reflecting Pool.<br>Read: Let them eat gold<br>Trump was not wrong in thinking it could use a little love. The Reflecting Pool, which stretches east from the Lincoln Memorial, on the National Mall, toward the Washington Monument, has long leaked and showed its age, bedeviling administrations for decades. In April, Trump announced a solution: a swimming-pool liner that would be, in his words, American-flag blue. To complete the project before the July 4 festivities, the Trump administration awarded no-bid contracts to redo the base of the pool and install a nanobubbling system that was meant to kill off algae growth. Instead, the algae flourished, the pool turned green, fences went up, and mitigation efforts failed. The Reflecting Pool undeniably looked worse. More than $16 million was wasted, and the national symbol was closed on the nation’s birthday.<br>Trump was furious. One of his signature projects had fallen apart—and he needed a scapegoat. He settled on an unexpected one: an Olympic canoer. David Hearn, 67, says he had just finished up a bike ride when he swung by the Reflecting Pool to see the failing sealant and reached down to touch the green water. He was arrested and detained for hours. The case, on its surface, seemed ridiculous. But it gained traction when Trump, reeling from the renovation’s failures, began going on Truth Social to blame so-called vandals for destroying the pool and accuse them of cutting an (improbable) 250-foot gash down the middle. Media outlets promptly debunked the claim with a series of fact-checks, but Trump was undeterred, relentlessly claiming that the pool had been vandalized.<br>Even some of his closest allies, two of them told me, privately...