The president’s attempt to make his mark on the National Mall has become a big, wet mess.
The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool appears green due to algae growth after it was painted blue.
(Graeme Sloan / Bloomberg)
It would be a bit too on the nose for our malignant-narcissist president to be undone by a reflecting pool, yet who are we to argue with the designs of the gods? Just two months into Donald Trump’s impulsive, ignorant, and cronyist campaign to renovate the pool at the Lincoln Memorial, the whole $14 million boondoggle has collapsed into a paint-flaking, algae-blooming shit show. Rarely has the term “quagmire” been more apt for an executive-branch undertaking.
Trump, ever keen to shift blame to phantom formations of MAGA underminers and “lunatic leftists,” claims that the unsightly neon-green fiasco he’s overseen is actually the handiwork of malicious vandals—without bothering to cite any evidence, let alone to explain how these cunning agents of chaos have mastered the art of telepathically unsealing underwater paint or causing algae to proliferate. Nevertheless, under Trump’s deranged command, law enforcement officials and National Guard members have started to arrest passersby, even though the members of this menacing fifth column seem in most cases to have done nothing more than put their hands in the water; in one notorious case, the pool police arrested a 67-year-old three-time Olympian canoer for touching a paint chip that had peeled off of its own accord.
Among other things, the pool debacle is a tidy set piece showcasing Trump’s militant disregard of basic information that doesn’t plump his mogul vanity. The self-serving fable that he’s heroically rescuing the Reflecting Pool from years of neglect at the hands of Barack Obama and Joe Biden of course overlooks his own first term, which would at a minimum have been a caretaker regime in this Democratic campaign of pool neglect. And after awarding massive no-bid contracts to insiders (including his comically corrupt air-filtration crony John J. Cafaro), Trump’s been suitably owned by working-class pool technicians who actually know about how algae proliferates. While rain and environmental contamination are key factors stoking algae blooms, they thrive especially in conditions of heat. As the YouTube pool tech Swimming Pool Steve explains, “The recent renovations saw the color change to a darker blue color, and darker blue, especially in a shallow body of water with a large surface area, will result in the water being warmer.” In other words, the introduction of the “American Flag Blue” paint shade that Trump claims to have helped originate has turned out to be, like virtually every other feature of the president’s con-man portfolio, a contamination accelerant.
Virtually every aspect of the pool’s deterioration and rampant algaeification is, uh, awash with symbolism, from the authoritarian crackdown on nonexistent pool vandals to Trump’s diehard efforts to render Barack Obama as the central villain in the alleged prior deterioration of the pool. Yet there’s another reason Trump is obsessed with claiming credit for a revived Reflecting Pool. This fantasy allows him to replay a key pivot point in his quest for public renown: his 1986 agreement to take over the operation of the dilapidated Wollman Ice Rink in New York’s Central Park.
The local HRH Construction firm was actually responsible for completing the rink’s successful renovation, but in what would become a drearily predictable pattern, the young real estate claimed all credit for himself, casting himself as a private-sector savior figure right out of an Ayn Rand novel. “There are so many myths about this thing,” former New York Parks commissioner Adriean Benepe, who worked as an agency spokesman at the time of Trump’s takeover, told Bloomberg News. “One was that he did it for free. No, he did it for whatever the budget was. Another myth: he did something the city never could have done. Well, no, the project was largely complete by the time he took over.” Also in line with his larger business biography, Trump minted this early exercise in civic-tinged self-branding into massive returns: By the time of his first presidential run, the Trump Organization had booked more than $59 million in profit from its contracts to run Wollman and other formerly public New York attractions.
Trump has another powerful motivation for wishcasting a Wollman do-over on the National Mall: In 2021, in that heady time when it seemed like Trump might actually be held responsible for fomenting the failed coup of January 6, New York canceled all its Trump Organization contracts. (In the other main narrative through line of Trump’s public career, he sued to get them restored.) For a president who issued blanket pardons to January 6 rioters while continuing to appoint them to sensitive posts, New York’s economic blockade has to be a distinct sore spot. Now that Trump occupies the seat of maximum governmental power, he no doubt thought that the Reflecting Pool’s makeover would be a suitable “I’ll show them” flourish—and unlike other grotesque imperial follies, such as his massive ballroom project and his projected triumphal arch defacing the entrance to Arlington National Cemetery, this one could be chalked up, like the Wollman takeover, to the great leader’s benevolent civic spirit.
Yet, as that other fabled New York gangster Jay Gatsby learned to his dismay, you cannot, in fact, relive the past. If the Wollman project, in launching a ruinous generation’s worth of neoliberal private-public partnerships, was a civic tragedy, Trump’s Reflecting Pool self-own is pure farce—a suitable bookend to the UFC kickoff of the country’s summerlong celebration of its semiquincentennial that Trump convened on the White House lawn on the occasion of his 80th birthday. (Indeed, the president was rushing to wrap up the whole Reflecting Pool project—which nevertheless ran grievously over budget and behind schedule—in order for it to be ready by July 4.) Trump is no more a master builder than he is a master negotiator or economic thinker; he is, rather, a Midas in reverse, with all that he touches now congealing into green slime.
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Onward,
Katrina vanden Heuvel
Editor and Publisher, The Nation