One day in April 1979, Jimmy Carter was out fishing alone in a Plains, Georgia, pond during a brief vacation away from the White House. What he described as a “swamp rabbit” started swimming toward the boat, teeth bared and “hissing menacingly.” Carter, separated from the Secret Service, was on his own. He wielded his paddle and swatted in the rabbit’s direction; it changed course.
None of this would have been more than an amusing anecdote Carter told staff if an Associated Press reporter hadn’t gone out drinking with White House press secretary Jody Powell a few months later, in the dead of a Washington summer. (Powell later said it was over a cup of tea; OK, sure.) Powell let slip the killer rabbit story, and the reporter, having nothing else to cover in August, wrote it up. The Washington Post put it on the front page (“Bunny Goes Bugs: Rabbit Attacks President”), and fashioned a parody Jaws movie poster to illustrate the story, with the moniker “PAWS.” (Do rabbits have paws? Never mind, we’re on a roll.) This was a big media story for at least a week, and after Carter lost the presidency, Ronald Reagan’s team found a picture of the incident taken by a White House photographer and released it, giving the story more legs, or paws.
The story became something Washington reporters just love: a synecdoche. Though nothing really happened, Carter getting attacked by a killer rabbit became a symbol of a feckless presidency, the paddle splash symbolic of his flailing amid global crises like the Iran hostage situation. Carter was seen as weak, or at least that was the red meat served up by Reagan’s campaign. And the killer rabbit fit that narrative, and was easy enough for the public to understand.
We’re seeing that dynamic now in real time with Donald Trump and the green Reflecting Pool. This isn’t the most important story, or the biggest example of Trumpian corruption, incompetence, humiliation (it took a bigger body of water, the Strait of Hormuz, to do that), or conspiracism from this president. But it’s rather easy to understand, and there’s an ever-present visual reminder that cannot be explained away.
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You have the sudden DEFCON 1 imperative to fix the pool, demanded by a president focused on the wrong priorities. You have the Trumpian boasts that nobody had remedied this national disgrace in 100 years, but he alone could do so. You have the no-bid contracts for a total cost of over $16 million and counting, with more than twice the usual profit margin, for cleaning, filtration, and a layer of “American flag blue” paint on the bottom meant to ensure a consistent color. You have part of that, a $1.7 million no-bid contract, given to John J. Cafaro, a Trump donor, Mar-a-Lago neighbor, and understudy in a high school musical theater production of The Sopranos. You have the paint inevitably peeling off and the algae returning to its traditional perch, with Trump literally unable to drain the swamp. You have the president, manic about being defeated by microscopic aquatic organisms, claiming that dastardly Democratic vandals unloaded fertilizer into the pool and sliced up the paint, insisting that there’s visual evidence of this without releasing it, sending out law enforcement to arrest the perfidious saboteurs (one of them a three-time Olympian who was just an onlooker), and threatening lawsuits against the media for not reporting these facts.
Literally everything wrong with Trump 2.0 is revealed in this story. He’s fiddling with the bottom of the pool while Rome burns, while inflation rises and precarity builds. He’s paying off cronies with our money to make things worse. And he refuses to take responsibility for failure, instead blaming anyone and everyone else with a sea of lies.
Barack Obama’s administration did indeed spend twice as much to beautify the pool and faced the same result. But this project is now a symbol of Trump’s broken presidency. And once the public makes that connection, no amount of bluster will beat the charges. Trump’s toxic reputation is increasingly and perhaps permanently linked to a slimy green pool.
Oh well. At least there aren’t any rabbits roaming in it.
