Trygve Hammer
July 9, 2026 · Newsletter
It’s Not Easy Bein’ Green
If there were a National Museum of China, Glassware, and Crystal in Washington, DC, it would be on most of our minds about as often as we wondered who was the ninth-ranked badminton player in the world (Yu-Yu Ong, Taiwan) or whether there had always been an n in badminton and why we Americans hadn’t removed it as we did with the u in words like colour and neighbour.1 Especially in a time of war and rampant inflation, that museum of fragile things would reside outside our awareness until the president of the United States tweeted:2 “There is an absolutely filthy Squirrel loose in the CHINA museum. Sleepy Joe Biden and Barrack HUSSEIN Obama failed to prevent Nasty Tree VERMIN from invading our Precious Displays of Cups and Dishes and shiny glass stuff that sometimes makes rainbow colors. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and I are working on this DISASTER and will get the bushy-tailed tree rat removed in record time and way under budget! Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP”
Asked about it in the Oval Office the next day, the president would say, “I’ve got a gopher guy. He does my golf courses, the most beautiful golf courses in the world, many people say. Many people—in fact, most people—say that. And he gets it done cheap, just him and some teenage boys with nine irons, because you need to get some loft on ground squirrels, or tree squirrels, which are also bad and distracting on a golf course. A nine iron is just perfect, even with a prairie dog or any other dog or anything with fur that can dig a hole. It’s an emergency, so Secretary Burgum—have you seen his wife? she’s the reason I hired him—has already drawn up a contract. No bids, no bids. It’s an emergency, so we’ve got the best people on it. Doug is doing a great job, by the way. He’s unleashing heavy metals in the boundary waters and road construction through forests where, until now, people had to walk with sticks and big backpacks like lost caddies without golf carts. Can you believe that?”
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The president’s advisers would all nod their heads in agreement.
“That’s a great idea, Mr. President!”
“Even better than bombing Iran, sir!”
“It’s horrible that people have to walk in the woods!”
A couple days later, when the museum is in shambles and the squirrel has moved inside the museum walls via one of the many holes nine-ironed into it, a reporter might ask, “Mr. President, we are hearing of some setbacks in the squirrel-removal project. Do you still have faith in the contractor, and has the cost of the project increased?”
“I haven’t heard anything about problems,” the president would say. “I think that’s fake news, just like you, Piggy. Real reporters fill out their blouses a lot better than you, if you know what I mean. This is Doug Burgum’s thing. I had nothing to do with it. Not my decision, and I don’t even know the people they hired.”
“But Mr. President—”
“Quiet, Piggy.”
Then, once the walls were poorly patched and the damage impossible to ignore, another tweet:
“Radical Leftist Communist Antifa vandal-terrorists have caused GREAT DAMAGE to our Beautiful museum of dishes. I say “dishes” because it’s not CHINA anymore. From now on, we’re calling fine dishware AMERICA, no matter where it is made. It’s Fine America. We’ve Made America Fine Again. We’ve also made several arrests, and Jeanine Pirro, the greatest ever Attorney General for the District of Columbia, has convened a GRAND JURY to indict Sister Margaret Mary Mullen, who was caught red-handed outside the museum shining pride-flag colors on the sidewalk with a piece of our precious Crystal!!! She was dressed almost completely in BLACK, and was leading a group of children!!! That’s GROOMING. She’s a groomer, and, according to Melania, her shoes were an affront to Capitalism and definitely what a Marxist Communist Socialist Vandal-terrorist would wear. After just ten minutes of a lecture on Catholic theology from JD Vance, “Sister Maggie” confessed to a long list of unsolved crimes, including smuggling enough fentanyl into our country to kill 600 MILLION people. We are Making America Safe Again by taking dangerous criminals like Sister Margaret Mary Mullen of Massachusetts off of our streets. Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DONALD J. TRUMP”
The next day, the National Guard would set a perimeter around the museum. The president, now bored with the project, would declare victory over the squirrel and all rodents across the country and take Doug Burgum and his wife for a ride on that flying monument to emoluments, the new Air Force One. In his rally speech, Trump would praise Burgum’s handling of the squirrel crisis. “Doug did a great job,” he’d say, “and now the Museum is more beautiful than it was on the day it opened. By the way, have you seen Doug’s wife? I saw her, and that’s when I decided he was the right guy for the job. You’re a lucky guy, Doug.”
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Of course, we don’t have a National Museum of China, Glassware, and Crystal, but presidential tweets have alerted us to lots of other things that had not been on our minds, like the need for a ballroom (National Security!) where the East Wing of the White House once stood and a giant arch near Arlington and, most recently, the state of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. I have walked by that pool dozens of times, but I hadn’t thought about it in years before Donald Trump tweeted on the last day of March:
“Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum and I are working on fixing the absolutely filthy Reflecting Pool between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument. This work was supposed to be done by the Biden Administration, but Sleepy Joe doesn’t know what “CLEAN” or proper maintenance is — The President and Secretary do!”
And then on April 9th:
“President Donald J. Trump and Secretary of the Interior, Doug Burgum, are proud to be fixing the once beautiful Reflecting Pool between The Washington Monument and The Lincoln Memorial. We were told it was going to take YEARS to do this job, and it will take a fraction of that time, at a fraction of the cost — and it will be much more beautiful than the day it was built! President DONALD J. TRUMP”
Then, for some reason, at a health care affordability event on April 23rd, the president had a great deal to say about the reflecting pool:
“The other thing that we’re doing that’s taking place right now is the Lincoln Memorial has a beautiful reflecting pond or lake. They call it a pool, lake and pond, all -- everybody has different -- but the word reflecting is a good term. It was built in 1922 and it was built out of granite and various stones on the bottom. And they never look great because that’s not really meant to be a stone that’s underwater for that much of a period of time.”
As it does for all of us, the Reflecting Pool made Donald Trump think about crowd size:
”It’s about a foot and a half to two feet deep. You all know it well. That’s where Martin Luther King gave his great speech and he had a million people. And I had the same exact crowd, maybe a little bit more but they said I had 25,000 people on July 4th. I have pictures of Martin Luther King’s crowd and my crowd. It’s the exact same, everything, but it was 70 years difference, the exact same crowd, but I actually had more people but that’s OK.”
Then he talked pool size for a while (we’ll skip that) before recounting conversations with Doug Burgum and a pool contractor:
“I said, ‘Doug, I’m getting a lot of complaints about the condition of this, what do you think?’ And he went over and studied it and he came back with some ideas. But I said, ‘You know, Doug, I have a guy who’s unbelievable at doing swimming pools. Up the road, we have a club. We have an Olympic size swimming pool. He did it 20 years ago and it’s perfect to this day.’
“So I asked them, I said, ‘I have an idea. I’m going to send my contractor over and take a look.’ He looked at it. He called me up. He said, ‘Sir, we can do something on it.’ He said, ‘It’s perfect.’ Actually, he said, ‘It’s really decaying and it’s in terrible condition.. . . It’d take me two weeks, and if you don’t mind, I’d like to pour the latest and greatest filament or material, which is essentially a pool surface, but it’s industrial-grade pool.’
“And he said, ‘What color would you like, sir?’”
“I said, ‘Well, what about turquoise, like in the Bahamas?’”
“He said, ‘Well, this is Washington, sir. We can give you turquoise, but why don’t you try, like, we have a color. It’s called American Flag blue?’”
“I said, ‘That’s the color I like.’ He talked me into it very easily.”
“So he said, ‘That’s the color I like.’ So, uh, he came in. And remember, three and a half years, you have to take all the granite out and you have to put all brand new granite in, take years to do it, over $300 million. Uh, our job will take one week. It will cost about $1.5 million. And people said, ‘Wow!’”
Wow! Here’s the thing about American flag blue: it absorbs more heat than a lighter color. Add to that a heat wave and the usual “new pond syndrome” conditions, and algae is almost guaranteed. As far as the flaking sealant goes, most experts suspect it was caused by trapped moisture.
The entire project followed a predictable pattern: (1.) Trump tweets or talks about something that has been on no one’s mind. (2.) It’s a disaster because of Biden and/or Obama. (3.) Only he can fix it or he has a guy. (4.) He specifies a solution good advisers would warn against. (5.) No-bid contract to cronies. (6.) Solution makes things worse. Project is half done and over budget.
(7.) Didn’t know him, just a coffee boy, as in this quote from the end of long tweet about the “failing New York Times” and their article on the Reflecting Pool project:
“I saved more than 390 Million Dollars, and 4 years of no “mess,” and was, of course, given no credit by the biased New York Times. Also, I didn’t give out the contract, “Interior” did, to a contractor I did not know, and have never used before. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DJT
( 8.) Biden, Obama, Antifa, thugs, vandals, etc. are blamed. (9.) Donald Trump loses interest and declares victory.
(10.) And have you seen this guy’s wife?! From Donald Trump’s July 1st speech in Medora, North Dakota:
1“I thought he [Doug Burgum] was very impressive. I thought his wife, Catherine, was even more impressive, to be honest with you. And so impressive that I said, ‘He’s a good man; that guy is all right.’”
You can blame Noah Webster for that oversight. He also wanted to change women to wimmen, which he said matched the pronunciation better and sense to many second and third graders. However, he defined wimmen as the plural of wimman, which didn’t fit well with his pronunciation argument.
2tweet (twēt) n., a short (in some cases, rambling) statement posted on social media— vi., to make such a statement — My use of the word applies to any platform, not just the one formerly known as Twitter.
Have you seen Trygve Hammer’s wife?! Or her cats?! Very impressive. So impressive that many people have said, “He’s a good man. That guy is all right for Congress. We should all send him money or something.”