What did Donald Trump do today?

He once again demanded that heads roll over imaginary anti-Trump "vandalism" that even his own DOJ won't touch.

Yesterday, the Department of Justice dropped charges against David Hearn, the man they had accused of "vandalizing" the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool. Hearn, 67 and a former Olympic champion canoeist, had bent to touch some of the newly installed spray-on lining that had peeled off from the bottom of the pool due to what the DOJ now admits was faulty installation. 

But Trump, who was reeling from embarrassment over the debacle that had become of his latest pet renovation project, was insisting that the deteriorating lining and even the normal algae bloom that followed the pool's refilling were the work of "vandals." He insisted that there was a "300-yard" gash that criminals had carved down the middle of the pool, even though nobody had seen any "vandals" wading out into the middle of the heavily surveilled pool, or could point to the existence of that huge gash.

With Trump ranting on social media about "criminals" trying to sabotage him, National Guard troops and park rangers were deployed to harass curious tourists, including Hearn, who had come to see the debacle for themselves.

In reality—as many experts had predicted even as the work was underway—the problem was that Trump hired inexperienced contractors to apply precisely the wrong kind of coating in precisely the wrong way, and had been caught on tape trying to fix their mistakes as they went along while the clock ticked on the Fourth of July celebration. Making that deadline was the "emergency" that Trump had used to justify a no-bid contract, which he gave to two companies owned by people who'd made large donations to his political funds and, in one case, had paid for a membership at Mar-a-Lago.

The DOJ's motion to dismiss charges against Hearn admitted that contractor error was to blame for the rapid deterioration of the lining. The motion was signed by US Attorney and Fox News host Jeanine Pirro, who had earlier gone on a media tour to gloat over the possibility that the "violent" Hearn would spend ten years in prison for his "willful destruction of property." But in the dismissal motion, Pirro directly accused the Department of the Interior of providing false information about what park employees had witnessed, and of covering up the "rushed and flawed" nature of Trump's alterations to the pool.

That, finally, brings us to today.

Trump lashed out bitterly at Pirro in a social media post this morning, part of an emotionally overwrought binge of almost 50 posts—mostly low-quality AI slop images—in quick succession. He wrote that he "100% disagreed" with Pirro's admission that no vandalism was involved, sputtering, "I don't know what she was thinking?" He also dispatched Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior, to repeat Trump's claims about the invisible vandalism he insists must have happened.

Neither Burgum nor Trump addressed the photographic evidence provided in the dismissal motion of blistering, peeling, bubbling, and adhesion problems the lining was suffering even before it was complete.

It is, as usual, impossible to tell whether Trump actually still believes that a senior citizen and former torchbearer for the US Olympic team was part of a conspiracy to embarrass him by touching the peeling paint in a public park. 

Hearn will not be reimbursed for his attorney's fees or the lost time he spent in preliminary court appearances, and in spite of even Republican commentators saying that he should sue the government for malicious prosecution, that would be very unlikely to succeed. Trump has insisted—contrary to his acting attorney general's promises—that he would find a way to force the government to create a slush fund for anyone he deems has been harmed by the "weaponization of government" and unjustly prosecuted for crimes for political reasons. It doesn't look like Hearn is exactly who Trump has in mind, though.

At least six other people have been charged with similar "crimes."

Why does this matter?

• Trump prosecuting an obviously innocent man to make political hay is somehow less disturbing than Trump actually believing a word of what he's saying. 

• Selecting citizens at random for prosecution for "crimes" in order to make the leader look strong is what happens in dictatorships.