You want something fixed, you call a guy. The president called a guy. Now the New York Times wants a 5,000-word investigation about it.
The reflecting pool contract is the cleanest piece of government work I’ve seen in twenty years, and naturally the New York Times is having a meltdown about it. A president saw a problem. He knew a contractor. He picked up the phone. The pool gets fixed in time for our 250th birthday. They want to call this corruption. I call it how my brother-in-law gets his deck stained.
I’ve sold a lot of things in my life. Flooring. Water filtration. One brief stretch of multi-level marketing I’d rather not revisit. And one thing I learned in sales is that the best deals never go out to bid. The best deals happen because somebody knows somebody, somebody trusts somebody, and a handshake gets the job done before the bureaucrats can write a 90-page request for proposal nobody reads.
This is Chris Cillizza, a man with a YouTube channel and a sweater, explaining to me why the president shouldn’t be allowed to hire a contractor:
It’s Called Knowing a Guy
The president called Atlantic Industrial Coatings, a Virginia outfit that does waterproofing on pipes, tanks, and culverts. They’d worked on his golf club. They could work on the pool. Done. Forty-five minutes, tops.
And before the usual suspects start their usual nonsense. I know what you’re going to say. You’re going to say “Brent, the president gave a no-bid federal contract to a guy who works on his private property.” Yeah. And? Every president has had guys. The Clintons had guys. Obama had guys. The difference is Trump’s guy actually showed up. The watchdog groups can publish their reports. I’ll be at the hardware store, where things still work.
About That Reflecting Pool Contract Price Tag
Now they’re saying the reflecting pool contract jumped from $1.8 million to $13.1 million. They’re moaning about bubbles. Mismatched blue. A contractor who—and this is the kicker—doesn’t advertise pool work on his website.
Let that sink in. Bubbles. In a pool. In America. The same country that put a man on the moon, and now the press wants you to panic about bubbles.
You know what causes bubbles? Construction. The mismatched blue? Daylight. A price going up sevenfold? Inflation, which the Democrats also caused. Coincidence? I think not.
The Lawsuit is the Real Scandal
Now some outfit called the Cultural Landscape Foundation is suing the federal government because Trump didn’t fill out the right paperwork before fixing the pool. A landscape foundation. For a swimming pool. I’ve heard of deep state shenanigans, but this is a new one.
You want to know why nothing gets built in this country anymore? Landscape foundations. The last guys did it the “right way,” and the right way was leaking 16 million gallons a year. Trump is doing it the Trump way. Sometimes a pool is just a pool, a guy is just a guy, and a handshake is just a handshake.
I see a man who knows a contractor, paying that contractor what the work costs, on a timeline that respects the American people. You know what that’s called? Plain common sense. And I’m full of it.
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