We are now officially in the Mad King stage of this administration.
So the president decided to refurbish the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool ahead of the country’s 250th birthday. He had the bottom painted “American flag blue.” He handed the no-bid algae-removal contract to a company owned by one of his own donors. And then he acted surprised when the predictable thing happened: the paint started peeling within days, and the water bloomed bright green. Anyone who knows the first thing about pools could’ve told him that painting the bottom dark and throwing off the chemistry is an open invitation to algae. That’s not sabotage. That’s incompetence. That’s what it looks like when you hand a job to people who don’t know how to do it.
I wrote a whole book about this collision —
Qualified: How Competency Checking and Race Collide at Work. We spend enormous energy interrogating whether qualified people — disproportionately Black people, women, anyone who isn’t the default — really belong in the room. And the genuinely unqualified fail upward, collect their combined forty percent in overhead and profit, and walk away from the wreckage they made. The pool is just one version of that story.
But the Mad King doesn’t see it that way, no, he blames sabtoures! He is blaming the public. He claimed, without evidence, that vandals had poured chemicals into the water and cut a gash in the facade. And then he sent in the National Guard.
They have arrested five people and cited five more. One of them is David Hearn, a sixty-seven-year-old, three-time U.S. Olympic canoeist who stopped at the pool at the end of a bike ride because he was curious. He touched a piece of the peeling coating. By his own account, he removed nothing, tore nothing, destroyed nothing — the pool looked exactly the same after he stepped away as it did before. For that, he was detained for roughly five hours and has a court date next month. He says the Guard member who arrested him couldn’t even name the law he had supposedly broken.
A military force, arresting citizens for looking too closely at a mess the king made himself. This is off-with-their-heads stuff. It’s the emperor with no clothes — except in this version, when the kid points and says the emperor is naked, nobody laughs. They arrest the kid.
It would be easy to file this under funny, weird news and move on. It isn’t that. It feels like a tipping point. Earlier abuses came with justifications you could at least squint at. There’s no squinting at this. This is a government accusing the people it serves of crimes to cover for its own failure.
The Story They Aren’t Telling
While the National Guard patrols a swimming pool, the truth about how many Americans are out of work is not being monitored.
This administration fired the official responsible for the Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers and replaced her. Now the figures coming out don’t match what anyone who actually works in the employment space is seeing on the ground. People keep explaining the gap by saying the numbers don’t capture the long-term unemployed. That’s not it. These numbers don’t capture the long-term, the short-term, or the just laid off. They are, plainly, not telling the truth. Someone made the analogy that the economy right now is a 747 flying with no pilot and no autopilot. We are flying blind.
I saw a clip this week from someone speaking on Instagram — the first person I’ve heard say it plainly. He talked about having more friends out of work over the past two years than at any point in his life, and not in one field: engineers, environmental policy people, journalists, and people in film. He described a friend who produced a Super Bowl commercial six months ago and has been unemployed ever since — someone who had worked steadily since she was sixteen and had never been out this long. And he talked about his students, who can technically get jobs, but not the kind of jobs that let you move out of your parents’ house. That, he said, is why people are furious — and the fury cuts across party lines, because both parties have failed to address it.
And these aren’t even the people who have fallen off the rolls. They’d still be counted, if the counting were honest. So the story is being managed in two directions at once: they’re playing fast and loose with who gets counted, and there’s a whole separate group that has already dropped off entirely.
Five or six months of unemployment is about the outer edge of what most people can survive on their savings. After that comes the 401(k) — the retirement money, drained just to keep the lights on. Then the home. Twelve months out, twenty-four months out, that’s not a setback. That’s a wipeout. It’s an emergency, and almost nobody with a platform is really talking about it.
And we get fairy tales on television about a roaring economy while citizens are handcuffed over a pool. That contrast is the whole story, and the people who oppose this administration need to say it a lot more plainly than they have been. The Mad King is arresting people over his vanity project — his pool, his ballroom, his arch — while Americans go six, eight, twelve, twenty-four months without work, losing their savings, their retirement, their homes. November is already here. It happened in the past; we’re just living in the result. The narrative they’re pushing isn’t true, and people know it. The work is to draw the line between those two things so clearly that nobody can unsee it.
The Canary Was Never Wrong
One more thing, because it’s the first sentence of my book, and it has only gotten truer.
This unemployment crisis is landing hardest, the way these things always do, on Black workers — and Black women especially. We were the lead indicator. The canary in the coal mine, signaling trouble long before it reached everyone else. I wrote that years ago. It came out last year. And the trouble we were signaling is here now, for everyone.
That’s what a K-shaped economy is. The people at the top of the K keep climbing. The people at the bottom keep falling. We’re not all in the same line heading the same way — we’re split, the split keeps widening, and the people running things would rather you watch the pool.
So watch the pool. Just know what it’s standing in for. A mad king who made a mess, blamed you for it, and sent soldiers to arrest you for noticing.
