Dana Milbank: Who Are the ‘SICK, DERANGED PEOPLE’ Vandalizing D.C.? I Think I Figured It Out!

President Trump is very concerned about vandalism in our nation’s capital, and I am here to help him.

The president got increasingly agitated as his beloved Reflecting Pool, within days of reopening, first turned green with thick clumps of algae, then saw its new “American Flag Blue” paint job peel off in chunks — perhaps because of the chemicals used to kill the algae. Trump’s great public-works project reached its apogee Sunday when a dead duckling was found floating in the foul-smelling chemical soup.

It all seemed to be a textbook case of incompetence: This is what happens when you give no-bid contracts to a political crony from Palm Beach and some guys who did work at your golf club in Virginia.

But Trump saw a conspiracy at work. He alleged on his Truth Social platform that “Radical Left Lunatics, most likely Dumocats” (meow!) had vandalized the Reflecting Pool by pouring “corrosive and destructive chemicals” into it.

“What these terrible Vandals have done is a true affront to both Presidents George Washington and Abraham Lincoln,” he announced Saturday, speaking for both men.

“WOW, who would do such a thing? SICK, DERANGED PEOPLE!” he submitted on Sunday.

By Monday he was threatening a “10 year prison sentence” and casting aspersions on a “pro-algae” protestor in a purple frog costume. And the National Park Police had begun rounding up people for the offense of merely touching the floating islands of blue paint.

Trump assigned particular blame to “lightweight ABC Reporter, Jonathan Karl [who] was seen sticking his hand into the Pool, and trying to rip the rubber off of the surface.”

How sick and deranged! “Is Jonathan Karl from ABC in trouble?” Fox News’ Peter Doocy asked Jeanine Pirro, the former Fox host and current U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia.

“Anyone who is in a position of vandalizing or attempting to vandalize the Reflecting Pool will face the criminal justice system,” Pirro responded.

It seems exceedingly unlikely that Karl somehow managed to evade security cameras, flood lights, the National Guard and the Park Police long enough to sabotage the entire Reflecting Pool — all without getting his business suit wet.

I’m also doubtful that Trump has evidence to support his charge that the person or persons who carved “86 47” in the grass on another part of the National Mall earlier this month were “probably inspired by Dirty Cop, James Comey!”

But I could not rule out the possibility that SICK AND DERANGED Radical Left Lunatics are indeed responsible for a wave of vandalism across the nation’s capital. I went to investigate — and discovered that the D.C. vandalism problem is far worse than I thought.

I began my investigation at Hains Point in far southwest D.C., where I found that vandals had dumped a veritable mountain of toxic debris — right next to the sixth tee of the White Course at East Potomac Golf Course.

“DO NOT ENTER RESTRICTED AREA” announces the fence around it. The vandals put more than 30,000 cubic yards of the debris here, leaching lead, chromium, PCBs, pesticides and petroleum byproducts onto the course and, presumably, into the Potomac River.

What Radical Left Lunatics did this?

Acting on a tip, I drove downtown, parked on 15th Street NW and looked west toward the White House from Alexander Hamilton Plaza. Sure enough: Vandals had torn down the entire East Wing, leaving nothing but a gaping hole and four cranes. So that’s where the toxic debris at Hains Point came from.

There had been other reports of vandalism nearby, in the Rose Garden (lawn torn out) and in the Treasury Department (currency defaced with an unauthorized person’s likeness). But these were nothing compared to the destruction I viewed when looking north from Constitution Avenue toward the White House. Vandals intent on staging a cage-fighting match had killed much of the South Lawn and almost all of the lawn on the Ellipse. The heavy equipment cleaning up the mess was causing a dust storm.

From there I traveled to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, where somebody had attempted to vandalize the building by putting his own name on it. When the culprit was ordered to remove his name, he hung a drape over the original name and left it there. Looking at it from a slight angle on Monday, I saw only the letters “THE JOHN F. K ING ARTS.”

It’s unclear which vandal did that, but it’s probably the same hooligan who hung the letters “Donald J. Trump” over the “U.S. Institute of Peace.”

Vandals had fanned out across the city to hang banners from government buildings. Somebody hung two from the Justice Department with Trump’s face and his campaign theme “Make America Safe Again.” The vandals also hung Trump’s face from the Labor Department. Some other wise guy hung a fake Teddy Roosevelt quote from the Theodore Roosevelt Building at 20th and E streets NW.

But give the vandals credit for irony. They have ringed much of federal Washington with fences, barriers, National Guard troops and armored vehicles, denying Americans access to Lafayette Park and large swaths of the Mall. And what do the banners hanging over this armed encampment say? “Freedom 250.”

I walked along the Reflecting Pool to check on the progress and found a still-murky mixture of blue and green, but four separate pumping stations filtering the water and National Park Service workers preparing to vacuum up more algae and loose paint.

I continued around to the back of the Lincoln Memorial and admired the iconic view across the Potomac to Robert E. Lee’s house in Arlington National Cemetery — a symbolic sightline created long ago to bind North to South. Vandals are now planning to destroy that sightline by erecting a garish arch in the middle festooned with eagles and lions.

I made one more stop on my tour: the Capitol, attacked by a mob five years ago in a rampage of vandalism and violence. I went inside to visit the plaque honoring the police “who bravely protected and defended this symbol of democracy on January 6, 2021. Their heroism will never be forgotten.”

Yet the vandals who now run Congress did everything they could to make sure it was forgotten. They hung the plaque this year — three years later than required by law — in the basement, without illumination, next to an emergency-exit-only door that sees almost no foot traffic.

What SICK, DERANGED PEOPLE would do such a thing?

I blame antifa. Or maybe Jon Karl.

Dana Milbank is a NOTUS Perspectives columnist.