Trump really has egg on his face due to the mess he has made of the Lincoln Pool. He seems so acutely embarrassed by this fiasco that he has set his attack dogs in the weaponized (in)justice department to arrest people whom he alleges have vandalized the pool and caused the coating to peel off and algae to proliferate. He has made extraordinarily detailed claims that they cut through the paint layer with sharp items.

“The 350 foot gash, made by a very sharp knife or razors, is actually numerous slashes over a very long 350 foot length. It was purposefully and criminally done, and somebody had to work very hard, probably in the dark of night, to create such a condition. Likewise, the small area at the bottom of the Pool was cut and powerfully lifted off the surface leaving very jagged, uneven edges.”

No evidence has been produced in support of this claim of vandalism even though the pool is in a very public space and monitored 24/7/365 by security cameras so if anybody did try to ‘vandalize’ it, or even just dip their hands in the water, the evidence would be easy to produce. The fact that we have not seen any is a sign that the vandalism charge may have been cooked up to take attention away from the mess that Trump himself has created.

[UPDATE: For the first time, a named top official at the National Park Service has made the charge in court, although his “statement does not say when exactly the damage occurred or whether it was a suspected case of vandalism and does not identify anyone who might have been involved.”]

The only person who has been publicly named and arrested is a former Olympics canoeist who quite openly put his hand in the pool and touched the peeling layer because he was curious as to what it felt like. Meanwhile, Jonathan Karl, a prominent reporter for ABC News, put his hand in the Pool and waved the peeling layer back and forth and showed it on TV and has not been charged, showing how absurd this is.

It appears that we now have members of the Oklahoma National Guard patrolling the pool though what purpose they serve is unclear. Dipping one’s hand into an open pool of water, an innocuous act at the best of times, has been elevated by Trump into an act of great political significance, a threat to the government. Trump may well surround the pool with a wall of troops or even build a fence to prevent anyone going near the pool, thus escalating the farcical nature of the whole thing. Since any renovation of the pool os going to take weeks at least, and we are likely to see the algae return, this soap opera will be continuing for some time.

For some reason, I was reminded of the famous Salt March of 1930 led by Mahatma Gandhi to protest the monopoly on the collection and manufacture of salt that had been imposed by the British. People who lived on the coast had always been able to make salt easily on their own by evaporating sea water but now they were forbidden to do so and had to purchase it from the government.

Gandhi announced a march to the coast and that he would make salt himself. His threat was derisively dismissed by the British governor and even some of his allies in the independence movement felt that focusing on salt looked trivial. But Gandhi felt otherwise.

Gandhi had sound reasons for his decision. An item of daily use could resonate more with all classes of citizens than an abstract demand for greater political rights.The salt tax represented 8.2% of the British Raj tax revenue, and hurt the poorest Indians the most significantly. Explaining his choice, Gandhi said, “Next to air and water, salt is perhaps the greatest necessity of life.”

Starting with just with 78 people from his ashram, Gandhi set out for the coastal town of Dandi 385 km away. As they marched, the crowd swelled, with tens of thousands lining the route. It became a massive international spectacle, covered by the world’s media. On the morning of April 6th, Gandhi picked up a lump of salty mud, boiled it in seawater and evaporated it and made salt.

Other salt marches quickly followed and were conducted with marchers under strict instructions to not even defend themselves from any police attack. The British were at a loss as to how to deal with this form of civil disobedience where people would not even try to protect themselves and it seemed to enrage them, with soldiers resorting to violence and clubbing marchers, as in this report by a western correspondent who defied British censorship to get the story out to the world, showing the brutality of the British.

Not one of the marchers even raised an arm to fend off the blows. They went down like ten-pins. From where I stood I heard the sickening whacks of the clubs on unprotected skulls. The waiting crowd of watchers groaned and sucked in their breaths in sympathetic pain at every blow. Those struck down fell sprawling, unconscious or writhing in pain with fractured skulls or broken shoulders. In two or three minutes the ground was quilted with bodies. Great patches of blood widened on their white clothes. The survivors without breaking ranks silently and doggedly marched on until struck down … Finally the police became enraged by the non-resistance … They commenced savagely kicking the seated men in the abdomen and testicles. The injured men writhed and squealed in agony, which seemed to inflame the fury of the police … The police then began dragging the sitting men by the arms or feet, sometimes for a hundred yards, and throwing them into ditches.

Following that, millions of people across the country broke the laws by making and selling salt and refusing to pay the salt tax. That simple act of making their own salt triggered an overreaction by the colonial government and led to the civil disobedience movement in India that eventually led to exit of the British from India.

I am not suggesting that the Lincoln Pool nonsense has anywhere near that level of significance or impact. The comparison is about how when a government gives a common, even trivial, matter an exaggerated level of importance, it just makes itself look ridiculous and elevates those who defy it.