When Donald Trump decided to blame “vandals” for his Reflecting Pool fiasco, many of the president’s critics pointed to the inconvenient fact that these nefarious scoundrels did not appear to exist in reality. Many of the White House’s Republican allies, however, clung to a specific argument.

That some people were formally accused by prosecutors of vandalizing the Reflecting Pool, Republicans said, suggested that Trump’s claims couldn’t be entirely made up. After all, these GOP partisans argued, if the president’s claims didn’t have at least some merit, the charges wouldn’t have been filed in the first place.

This argument has collapsed in humiliating fashion in recent days.

The most notable example came late Friday, when U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro, the top federal prosecutor in Washington, D.C., moved to drop her felony case against former Olympian David Hearn, conceding that the damage to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool was caused by “botched work” performed by the project’s contractor, not by criminal conduct.

Hearn, however, was not alone. The New York Times reported:

Prosecutors in Washington are dropping charges against three more defendants who had been accused of vandalizing the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. […]

Along with Mr. Hearn, prosecutors moved to drop charges against three others: Justin Carreno, Sophie Dennison-Gibby and Cameron Thiers, who all were charged with destruction of property less than $1,000.

For the White House, this is a genuine political disaster. With four collapsed cases, it appears increasingly obvious that the incumbent president’s embarrassment at his own failure led him to advance these fraudulent claims to the American public.

Common sense suggests that Trump should try to change the subject and hope people forget that he spent months pointing to nonexistent vandals, but at an unrelated event on Monday afternoon, the Republican couldn’t seem to help himself.

Pointing to evidence he keeps claiming to have, Trump told reporters, “We have photographs or tapes, like moving cameras” that show people “cutting it with a box knife.” He added, “Jeanine Pirro made a mistake. There was vandalism.”

The lawyers in Trump’s Justice Department who have actually seen the evidence came to the opposite conclusion, which necessarily leads to questions as to why the president keeps doubling down on a self-satisfying fiction he prefers to reality.

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