WASHINGTON — President Trump took to Truth Social early Saturday to shoot down a report that he wants to rip out the White House press room and bring back the swimming pool underneath it. Good news for the press corps: they're not being replaced by a pool. Bad news: they might be replaced by a hallway.

"Although I may move the Fake News to a less obnoxious location, the old swimming pool will never be brought back," the president wrote. "I NEVER even thought to do such a stupid thing!"

That is the most reality-TV sentence ever typed by a head of state. It's a "Bachelor" rose ceremony where the bachelor announces nobody's going home, then asks producers to move the contestants' mansion next to the dumpsters.

A quick history lesson, since the briefing room literally has a basement. The James S. Brady Press Briefing Room sits on top of an indoor therapy pool installed for Franklin D. Roosevelt. The Nixon administration covered it over and gave the space to reporters. Which means for more than half a century, the most self-important people in Washington have been standing on a pool cover, and not one of them has noticed the metaphor.

The New York Times reported Tuesday that Trump urged then-press secretary Karoline Leavitt in August to move news conferences out of the room, and that he preferred the old pool. The idea was never carried out.

Then the plot thickened, the way plots do when somebody goes on Bill Maher. Leavitt, appearing on HBO's "Real Time," said the room was a swimming pool at one time, that you can still see the tile if you go down the stairs, and that the president had been "flirting" with the idea.

So: his former press secretary says he was flirting. The next morning, he says he NEVER even thought about it. That's not a denial. That's a "Love Island" recoupling where both people swear they were just talking.

The press corps is treating all of this like the season finale of a show only they watch. Last month, Trump briefly banned reporters from CNN, MS NOW and Politico from White House grounds, and a judge restored their access. So they've seen this episode. They know how it ends: a lawsuit, a cable panel about the First Amendment, and a group selfie in the hallway they're about to be moved to.

Here's the part that stings for regular people. Your neighborhood pool has been "closed for repairs" for three summers. Your HOA dues went up anyway. And the only pool in America getting a national news cycle is one that's been buried under the floorboards since the Nixon administration, underneath a room full of people who complain for a living.

So the official White House position is now crystal clear: no pool, maybe a move, never a thought. The press corps keeps its seats for now, right where it's always been: on a cover, over the deep end.

This article is satire. The Demorat is a parody news site; real facts are drawn from the linked sources, and jokes, invented scenes, and fictional characters are not real.

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