Perhaps it is time for some reflection. That (or similar jokes and puns) is now the easiest way to poke fun at Donald Trump's absolute incompetence. Trump subscribes to the Silicon Valley maxim "move fast and break things," which you will note does not include "and fix things" or anything remotely like it. Which is exactly what has happened with the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. This fiasco has now transformed into authoritarian farce, it has all moved so fast.

The most poignant commentary I've yet read on the subject started off with a some very appropriate mythological history:

The word "narcissist" comes from the Greek myth of Narcissus, which tells the story of a young man so enamored of his image in a reflecting pool that he is unable to look away. He eventually dies from his own egotism and turns into a flower.

Donald Trump is no doubt ignorant of this story, even as he loves to imagine himself connected to the glories of antiquity, so it's fitting that he is reenacting the tale from Ovid's poetry as a distorted, expensive farce. Like the mythical figure who gave name to Trump's most prominent personality flaw, the president became fixated on the famous Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, hoping to repaint it so that it mirrored his imagined brilliance. Instead, the algae-ridden water has turned into an on-the-nose metaphor for his own decrepitude, as tourists have begun swarming it so they can mock this totem of Trump's failures.

Let's just review how we got to this sorry state of affairs, shall we? Donald Trump apparently got a bee in his bonnet at some point and decided to include the Reflecting Pool in his grand design of remaking Washington D.C. into something far different than it has always been. He saw the Reflecting Pool as no more than a swimming pool at one of his resorts, and decided it was time for a makeover. When he first unveiled his plans, he could not even remember the proper name -- he kept calling it the "reflecting pond" or "reflecting lake." Which is about par for Trump's course, when it comes to ignorance of basic facts.

In any case, no matter what he called it, he put out no-bid contracts to paint the bottom of it dark blue. It will come as no surprise that he awarded the contracts to political cronies (read: donors) of his, which is always a sign of corruption. He insisted (to justify the no-bid contracts) that there was some sort of "national emergency" that needed to be remedied before Independence Day (which was simply not true, of course). Before anyone was even aware of what was going on, Trump's minions had drained the pool and started repainting the bottom.

There were problems with the paint (not being all the same shade), but they eventually got resolved. The bottom was now "American flag blue," and so they decided to test it out by filling it back up again.

Crucially, they decided to do this before a new filtration system was installed. They were going to rely instead on a temporary setup for a few weeks before the permanent system was complete.

Also crucially, they didn't flush the pipes out. The water in the pipes (leading to and from the filtration system) had been sitting there for weeks, getting more and more fetid. So when they turned the taps back on, the Reflecting Pool filled up and then almost immediately turned a sickly green. A monstrous algae bloom had taken place (which is a common problem for the Reflecting Pool, but this year's bloom was the worst to happen in many years).

Trump wasn't happy about this development, of course. At first, he tried to blame either Joe Biden or Barack Obama (which, again, is par for Trump's course). And he directed the Park Service to fight the algae any way they could. So they dumped industrial-grade hydrogen peroxide into the water, to kill the algae. Dozens of workers then spent many hours painstakingly using pool vacuums to get rid of all the dead algae on the bottom of the pool. This took days and days.

Meanwhile, either because of all the hydrogen peroxide dumped in the water or because of general incompetence by the contractor, large chunks of the sealant/color coating on the bottom of the pool began peeling up. Some chunks were spotted floating around, while others were still partially attached to the bottom.

Tourists began fishing some of the chunks out as souvenirs, and news reporters pointed their cameras at the dislodged chunks and even stuck their hands in the puke-green water to show what was happening.

Also, some dead ducks were found in the Reflecting Pool.

This was all merely the opening phase of the whole screwup. Trump had given a buddy of his a contract to do something, demanded it be done on a lightning-fast schedule, and then got a very shoddy result. So -- of course -- someone else must have been responsible for any problems.

Trump retreated to the fantasyland in his own mind, where dastardly leftists are continually plotting against him and everything he does. He accused these mythical anti-Trump loonies of causing the algae bloom in the first place, either by dumping algae-infected water into the Reflecting Pool, or dumping in fertilizer or other chemicals that algae love to feed on.

He also accused these mythical "vandals" of cutting up the paint and sealant at the bottom of the Reflecting Pool. He made a very specific accusation about someone using a "box-cutter" to put a "300-foot gash" (it started at only 250 feet, but is now up to 350 feet in Trump's telling, which is also par for his bombastic course), even though last month he had bragged to reporters about the coating on the bottom:

This will last for at least 50 years. You'll never have a leak. It's very strong. You couldn't, if you had a knife -- I don't want to give anybody ideas. If you had a knife, you can't even cut it. So strong, so powerful, it's like powerful rubber. It is beautiful. Sealed.

The idea of someone cutting it had obviously already occurred to Trump previously, but it is so downright preposterous it defies belief. To accomplish this with a box-cutter, a person would have to get into the Reflecting Pool, bend down, and stick the knife under water. The water is anywhere from shin-deep at the edges to maybe thigh-deep in the center. Then you'd have to keep pressing down on the knife while walking the length of a football field. That'd be tough for anyone to do -- it'd be a cramp-inducing exercise at best. Maybe if you tied the box-cutter to a stick (making a little spear) that would make it easier, but still it's a rather preposterous notion that anyone would do such a thing.

A more-likely explanation -- if this "gash" even exists, since the White House has provided zero evidence of its existence other than Trump's blather -- is that one of the workers for the contractor inadvertently dragged a piece of equipment along the bottom (after it had been painted) which somehow cut a gash into it. That at least sounds somewhat plausible -- if the gash even exists (outside of the swamp fevers of Trump's mind, that is).

What is most likely is that either the sealant and paint were applied too quickly, or they hadn't fully dried out or prepared the surface before applying it, or that the hydrogen peroxide reacted with the paint/sealant and weakened it enough that it spontaneously started peeling up.

But here's where it descends into authoritarian farce. Because Trump was so convinced that dastardly lefties were somehow ruining his makeover of the Reflecting Pool, the Justice Department (aided and abetted by the National Park Police and the National Guard) began heavy patrols of the perimeter of the Reflecting Pool, and they started arresting anyone who stuck their hands into the water to touch the peeling-up chunks of paint/sealant. Such "vandalism" would be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, the Justice Department promised, egged on by Trump's threatening social media posts.

Such round-the-clock patrols are absolutely insane. The Reflecting Pool is over two thousand feet long, making the perimeter around 4,500 feet total. That is a lot of ground to cover, and it requires a whole bunch of cops to patrol. All because of Trump's mythical "vandals." And now they're going to surround the entire thing with a chain-link fence.

Trump's dreams of beautifying the Reflecting Pool (or pond, or lake, or whatever...) have not just ended in a fiasco, but they're going to end with shutting off public access to it entirely. It will be Fortress Trump Reflecting Pool for the foreseeable future, protected from all those dastardly tourists who stuck their hands in to bring home a piece of the evidence of Trump's incompetence.

When it was announced, Trump claimed that the entire project was only going to cost a couple of million dollars. This then rose to $14.7 million, plus another $1.7 million for the new filtration system. But now we've got to add into that the costs of paying all those dozens of employees who had to vacuum the entire Reflecting Pool for days, as well as the salaries of all the cops who are patrolling to stop non-existent mythical vandals, day and night. Plus the costs of putting up an enormous fence to surround it all. And Trump has announced that the whole thing will have to be drained all over again, to repair all the chunks that have separated from the bottom -- which will likely cost even more money, one way or another.

Eventually, the Independence Day crowds will come and go, and eventually the Reflecting Pool will (assumably) return to normal. Maybe they'll fix the algae problem, and maybe they won't (painting the bottom of the pool a dark blue just makes things worse, since it just heats the water up more, which facilitates the growth of algae). The fence will eventually come down and the night-and-day patrols will end, sooner or later.

And eventually all the charges against curious people who dipped their hands in the pool will get laughed out of court -- hopefully with the Justice Department on the hook for the defendants' legal fees, for bringing mythical charges that are nothing more than political harassment in the service of Donald Trump's gargantuan ego.

But all of this will happen only after a whole bunch of taxpayer money was wasted on yet another Trump boondoggle. Which, again, is about par for the course these days, for our narcissist-in-chief.

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant