The Giant Duck Death Trap

Source: Getty Images

Friday, June 26th, 2026

Bill Bonner, from London, England

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Here’s the latest, from USA Today:

The president’s approval rating started with a 50.5% approval and 44.3% disapproval at the start of his second term in January of 2025. It has been in a slow and steady decline ever since, with the current polls numbers showing his all-time low this week at 41.1% approval and 56.7% disapproval among Americans.

We’re astonished. Where do they find four out of ten people who still approve of Trump? The press has been so unrelentingly negative on POTUS, it’s amazing that anyone still backs him.

The poor man is just doing the job History has given him – wrecking the Empire. But the whole Fourth Estate — the media — seems to have ganged up on him. They report that the president falls asleep during critical meetings. He is ‘panicked’...‘desperate’...‘confused.’

They increasingly portray his as ‘out of touch with reality’...demented...suffering from a brain-eating senility. Can he do anything right, they ask?

They say he started a major war...with Iran...without realizing what he was getting into. After all, who could have foreseen that the Iranians would try to close the Strait of Hormuz? And then, all he could do, say the news analysts, was rant, rave, threaten...and ultimately, capitulate. USA Today:

Trump’s Iran ‘peace deal’ isn’t a deal. It’s surrender.

The Mirror adds:

Trump’s terrible Iran deal is costly, dangerous and far worse than Obama plan

But it’s the smaller bites that carry the deadliest venom. Yes, he might be wasting America’s defenses, and getting thousands of innocent people killed. Yes, ICE did things that were both illegal and uncivilized. And yes, the reciprocal tariffs that were going to bring a ‘Golden Age,’ were unconstitutional. And yes, DOGE proved almost laughably ineffective. But look what he’s done to the Reflecting Pool! The voters — who’ve dealt with tricky home improvements themselves — can understand this one.

The Reflecting Pool is ornamentation. Like a pair of earrings on a beautiful woman, she will still be beautiful without them. But Trump loves to pimp things up. So, in addition to a White House ballroom and a monumental, Mussolini-style arch, he decided that the Reflecting Pool needed a freshening up.

The idea was to put in a pool liner and a coat of sealer to fill the cracks and make the water appear blue. You’d think POTUS, with so much real estate experience, would be able to get it right. No need for competitive bids. He called in a buddy and gave him the contract. But no sooner was the pool refilled than it was time to get the pool guy back on the phone. Wired reports:

Algae blooms, peeling paint, and a host of fixes from hydrogen peroxide to nanobubblers have made it hard to diagnose what’s wrong with the Reflecting Pool — let alone how to clean up the mess.

Trump blamed leftist vandals. They’d stop at nothing, it was said, to wreck his plans for a more beautiful, more majestic capitol city. But the attempt to offload the failure only drew mockery. CNN:

Trump threatens serious criminal penalties for those he says ‘vandalized’ the Reflecting Pool

Philip Kennicott:

At the Reflecting Pool, Trump turns a serene oasis into a police zone

The botched renovation and images of arrests strike at the heart of the president’s supposed reputation for competence.

And then, yesterday, the dead ducks showed up. Poitico:

Dead ducks add to Trump’s reflecting pool drama

The discovery of a trio of dead ducks has prompted worries that President Donald Trump’s $16 million overhaul of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool has a fatal flaw...

The presence of deceased waterfowl has sparked speculation of toxic algae, sometimes known as blue-green algae, or cyanobacteria, in the lime-green gunk that swiftly proliferated after the Trump administration installed a commercial pool liner earlier last month.

Did TDS-afflicted leftists kill the ducks just to make POTUS look bad? Or did the duck deaths have nothing to do with the pool repairs? We don’t know, but the Reflecting Pool has become a damned “duck death trap,” says an environmental activist. Stay tuned.

Meanwhile, also making the president look bad was Italian prime minister Georgia Meloni, Trump’s most faithful ally in Europe. Trump said she had ‘begged’ him for a photo with him. She said she had not.

The press, now accustomed to Trump’s casual association with truth, believed Meloni. But this was not just another he said/she said gossip column spat. Nor was it at all momentous, as a disagreement over the terms of a peace treaty might be. This was the head of state for the US...not just lying, but acting like an oafish cad.

And soon, it looked like the press, all over the world, had drawn a disturbing conclusion. Especially the Italian press. Thomas Hartmann:

This weekend, the right-wing Italian daily Libero, a major conservative newspaper that shares a fair amount of Donald Trump’s politics, ran a one-word verdict on the President of the United States across its front page. The Italian word is coglione.

We had to turn to Google for a translation. But the closest English word is probably one that begins with an ‘a’ and refers to a particularly disgusting body part.

Regards,

Bill Bonner