Trump Trolls Trump Week 75

27 June, 2026

Karoline Leavitt Called The Media ‘Deranged’ Over The Reflecting Pool And It Backfired: Credit AP

Welcome to Trump Trolls Trump, where mockery remains our greatest weapon and Donald and his cronies continue giving us more material than any comedy writer could ever invent.

It has now been 516 days since Donald’s second inauguration on January 20, 2025. The so called golden age has officially turned deep algae green.

It was another bad week for Donald. Unfortunately, that also means it was another bad week for America. Still, there is at least one small consolation. Donald’s failures deserve to be mocked because nothing punctures authoritarianism more effectively than ridicule. They desperately want to be feared. They deserve to be laughed at.

Sadly, we begin this week with the return of somebody I had hoped might stay away a lot longer.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt is back after enjoying the kind of paid maternity leave that millions of American women can only dream about. During an appearance on Fox State TV, she defended Donald’s Reflecting Pool disaster by insisting that Americans elected him to “make America green again.”

Given Donald’s long running hostility toward renewable energy, windmills, and anything remotely environmental, that would have been difficult to believe under any circumstances.

Unless, of course, she was talking about algae.

Leavitt: The algae is obviously the news of the day and it is completely ridiculous. It’s unbelievable to see these people, these deranged leftists in algae costumes with team algae on their backs. What does that even mean? Only the Democrats could hate beautifying our nation’s capital and making it a symbol of pride again, but this is what the American people elected President Trump to do.

I honestly do not remember that campaign promise.

I remember Donald promising to lower prices. I remember him promising to reduce inflation. I remember him promising to release the Epstein files, despite the fact that his name reportedly appears countless times throughout them.

I do not remember him promising to cultivate algae.

Whether or not Donald campaigned on making algae great again is almost beside the point because here we are. The Reflecting Pool has become a national embarrassment. No amount of gaslighting from Karoline Leavitt is going to change what everybody can plainly see.

It is remarkable that after months away she has not lost even one ounce of her astonishing ability to deliver obvious nonsense with absolute confidence.

Welcome back.

Actually, no.

Please go back.

Donald also traveled to Pennsylvania this week for a rally supporting a Republican congressman whose name he could not remember. During the event, he attempted something that has never come naturally to him.

He tried comedy.

Specifically, he tried making jokes about Americans’ 401(k)s while speaking at a Mack Trucks factory.

Donald: The typical 401k, as you know, is up almost $30,000. It was 12 months. It was 13 months. It’s up 44%. Think of that. Up 44%. I was in New York. I met a great police officer in New York Finance and he said, “Sir, I want to thank you.” I said, “For what?” He said, “My wife didn’t think much of me. We were having marital difficulty. She thought I was nothing.” He said, “In the last year and a half my 401k is up 74%, sir. And she thinks I’m Warren Buffett. She thinks I’m a super genius.” I said, “How are you getting along with her?” He said, “Well, I’m not so sure I like her anymore.” Who has a 401k here?

Sometimes Donald’s complete detachment from reality is so extraordinary that it briefly leaves me speechless.

Think of that, he says.

Think about the completely invented statistic he just cited.

Then think about the entirely fictional police officer who apparently spends his free time actively trading inside his own 401(k), which is not generally how those retirement accounts work.

None of it makes any sense.

But Donald has never been constrained by facts.

He simply invents statistics, tells imaginary stories, and assumes that if he repeats them often enough, people will stop asking questions.

Unfortunately for him, reality keeps getting in the way.

Meanwhile, Republicans in Congress managed to accomplish something genuinely unusual this week. They negotiated a bipartisan housing bill, a rare example of Democrats and Republicans actually working together.

Naturally, Donald destroyed it.

Just as Republican leaders gathered to celebrate the legislation, Donald posted on his failing social media platform that he would refuse to sign the bill unless Congress first passed the SAVE Act, his voter suppression legislation that has repeatedly failed because it lacks Democratic support.

The announcement completely blindsided Republican leadership.

The signing ceremony was immediately canceled.

Any opportunity to demonstrate bipartisan cooperation disappeared because Donald simply could not allow somebody else to enjoy even the smallest political success.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, a man who never met a spine, immediately fell into line.

Mike Johnson: It is a dangerous thing. This is not a joke. We are in a fight right now to save the Republic and every American needs to take this seriously. You need to wake up. This upcoming midterm election is not the midterm elections of years ago. This is going to decide the direction of the country. Are we going to maintain our status as a constitutional republic on our 250th anniversary? Or are we going to go down some road toward a communist utopia?

For one deeply unsettling moment, Mike Johnson and I almost agreed.

He is absolutely right that this election will determine the future of the republic.

Where we differ is on who represents the actual threat. Johnson seems convinced Democrats are leading America toward some imaginary communist utopia.

The rest of us can plainly see that today’s Republican Party has spent years undermining democratic institutions, attacking the rule of law, dismantling constitutional safeguards, and embracing increasingly authoritarian politics.

So yes, this election matters.

Probably more than any election in modern American history.

Unfortunately for Mike Johnson, we understand exactly what is at stake. And it is not the fantasy he keeps trying to sell. Mike Johnson, however, was not finished embarrassing himself.

During that same press conference, he assured Americans that the economy was about to “take off like a rocket.” Given the current state of the economy, I suppose that depends entirely on what, exactly, is taking off. Inflation certainly is. Grocery prices are. Housing costs continue to climb. Insurance premiums remain painfully high. So, in that very limited sense, Mike Johnson was accidentally correct.

This is what Mike Johnson said:

If we keep gas prices down to earth, this economy’s going to take off like a rocket, y’all, because in 2025, as Scott Bessent said, the Treasury Secretary, he said months ago, 2025 was like setting the table. The feast and the banquet in the economy is in 2026. We were doing that in the first quarter. We had the Iran skirmish. We settled that thing out. We’re cooking with gas.

One thing I have noticed about Mike Johnson is that the more detached from reality his statements become, the faster he speaks. It is almost as if he believes that if he can get through the sentence quickly enough, nobody will notice how absurd it is. The feast is coming, apparently. We are “cooking with gas.” The economy is taking off like a rocket.

Unfortunately, the only things moving that quickly are the prices Americans are paying for virtually everything. Donald’s tariffs, his economic instability, and his illegal, unconstitutional war of choice have driven costs higher across the board, yet Republicans continue insisting that prosperity is right around the corner. At some point, “right around the corner” simply becomes another way of saying “it isn’t happening.”

Speaking of things that continue getting worse, somehow the Reflecting Pool fiasco refuses to die. What should have been a routine maintenance project on a small, manmade body of water has turned into one of the defining stories of the Trump regime. That may seem ridiculous, but the more this story develops, the more it becomes the perfect metaphor for Donald’s presidency.

Everything about it reflects who he is.

A project that should have cost a fraction of what taxpayers ultimately paid ballooned in price after Donald awarded it to one of his preferred contractors. The work was incompetently executed. Every attempt to fix the resulting disaster has only made it worse. Wildlife has been harmed. Millions of taxpayer dollars have been wasted. And instead of accepting responsibility, Donald continues searching for somebody else to blame.

This week, those culprits were supposedly mysterious “thugs” armed with razor blades.

Donald: No, but the water looks great, but we will do the final fix up. But just remember this, they took razor blades 350 feet. They took razor blades and knives and they cut patches like that 350 feet long. They cut the lining and there’s pictures of the guy bending over. I don’t know if anybody saw that, but there are pictures of the guy. And you say, “Who would do that?” Maybe it’s Trump Derangement Syndrome.

There are so many problems with this story that it is difficult to know where to begin.

First, did anybody actually see this mysterious vandal Donald keeps talking about? Apparently not. Second, according to Donald, someone managed to cut hundreds of feet of lining inside one of the most closely monitored public spaces in Washington without being stopped, despite cameras monitoring the Reflecting Pool around the clock. Third, we are somehow expected to believe that this elaborate act of sabotage was motivated by what Donald calls “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” rather than by the far more obvious explanation that the project itself failed because it was incompetently designed and incompetently executed.

Donald cannot accept that explanation because it requires acknowledging failure. Instead, fencing has been erected around the Reflecting Pool, tarps now block public view, and Americans are once again being instructed not to believe what they can plainly see with their own eyes.

That has become one of the defining characteristics of this administration.

Reality is never the problem.

The problem is always the people pointing out reality.

The Reflecting Pool has become far more than a construction project gone wrong. It is now a symbol of the Trump regime itself. Every decision creates a bigger disaster. Every attempted solution makes things worse. Every lie requires another lie to sustain it. And every failure somehow becomes somebody else’s fault.

Donald has spent his entire life trying to place the Trump name on absolutely everything. Buildings. Hotels. Casinos. Steaks. Vodka. Bottled water. Universities. Airlines. Board games. Cryptocurrency. Sneakers. Bibles. If there was a product that could carry his name, Donald wanted his name on it.

There is one place, however, where Americans have quietly rejected the brand.

Their children.

Back in the first half of the twentieth century, Donald was an extraordinarily popular boys’ name. It reached its peak in 1934, when more than 30,000 newborn boys were named Donald. Fast forward to 2025 and, according to Social Security Administration data, fewer than 400 boys received that name last year. It now ranks 690th nationally, the lowest ranking in its recorded history. Even in Florida, Donald’s adopted home state, only twenty-one boys were named Donald last year. Melania briefly entered the top one thousand girls’ names during Donald’s first administration before disappearing entirely.

There is something almost poetic about that.

Donald has devoted his entire life to branding himself, believing that if he could simply plaster his name on enough buildings and enough products, people would admire him. But parents make deeply personal decisions about the names they give their children. Those choices reflect hope, admiration, and optimism about the future.

Increasingly, Americans are deciding that “Donald” represents none of those things.

That may be the most honest referendum on his legacy we have.

He can force his name onto buildings, construction projects, government programs, and monuments to his own ego. He can spend millions trying to manufacture admiration. He can demand loyalty and surround himself with people willing to repeat his lies.

What he cannot do is make people genuinely respect him.

And he certainly cannot make them want their children to become him.

That brings us to the end of yet another week under the Trump regime. Once again, the corruption deepened, the incompetence became more obvious, and the gaslighting grew even more absurd. Donald and the people around him continue demanding that Americans reject objective reality in favor of whatever story happens to protect his fragile ego on any given day.

Fortunately, there is still one thing authoritarians have never figured out how to control.

Ridicule.

That is why we do this every week. They want to project strength. They want to appear inevitable. They want to be feared.

Instead, they continue giving us reasons to laugh.

And there is nothing more dangerous to an authoritarian than becoming the punchline.