As far as the blunders of Donald Trump go, the Reflecting Pool situation is a small one. Though a few dead ducks have been found in the area, no humans were harmed by the algae blooms and leaks that have sullied the president’s plans to beautify the national landmark. Over the course of Trump’s reign, much larger chunks of taxpayer money have been flushed into the Potomac for much vainer purposes.

But for nearly two months now, Americans have been gobbling up news of the “American flag blue” paint job that instantly turned green. Every turn the Reflecting Pool story took—the weirdo contractors, the hydrogen peroxide, the peeling sealant, the vacuum squad, the arrests—captivated the rubber-necking public. The New York Times gave the beat to one of its top investigative reporters, David Fahrenthold, who has logged an astonishing 17 bylines and counting on the topic, including an elegant interactive depiction of why the pool is so hard to keep clean. And you thought journalism was dead!

The tale of the faulty renovation spread like an out-of-control aquatic plant. When I visited the pool in June, I met two Australian tourists who’d read about the drama before ever setting foot in D.C. You’d be hard-pressed to find another story about landscape architecture repair that has inspired such lasting international excitement.

This isn’t the norm for a Trump slipup. A common claim of the Trump era is that no scandal sticks to “Teflon Don” for long because, like the Reflecting Pool, our brains can handle only so much scum at once. Every time the president inspires public ire over some illegal or immoral act, he tees up another one to divert our attention before any real movement for accountability can take hold.

Take Trump’s war in Iran. Commentators as politically disparate as Charles Blow and Joe Rogan have speculated that the president started the conflict to distract from scrutiny over the Epstein files, which was proving to be another remarkably sticky story. Whether or not that was Trump’s explicit reasoning, the war did shift the American focus toward new outrages, like the massacre of more than 100 schoolchildren and the clusterfuck at the Strait of Hormuz, at the expense of inquiries into which of our national leaders were involved in a homegrown child-sex-trafficking scheme.