This is all so pathetic — both the media’s obsession with the Reflecting Pool and Trump’s bleatingly pathetic inability to admit that he blew it.
I didn’t want to write this piece, but duty calls. I have no real opinion about the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, recently resurfaced and refurbished by the Trump administration on the taxpayer’s dime (a cool $16 million), in hopes of spiffing it up for the July 4 holiday. I thought it looked nice for a few days, but now everything’s gone green, and the pool’s ever-present algal masses have returned, as they often will during humid summers in Washington, D.C. (People who haven’t lived there really have no idea how persistently, infernally damp D.C. gets from June through early September.) It turns out that the Reflecting Pool wasn’t clotted with single-celled plant life during the Obama years just because Obama secretly hated America — although Trump certainly sought to cast it like that prior to the refurbishing.
So, even though I couldn’t care less, I guess that’s why everyone else — Trump himself included — is treating the fact that the new resurfacing job has already begun to peel and flake away as if it’s a political catastrophe on the order of Watergate, an even bigger scandal than the Iran MOU. The media have been staked out on the Washington Mall, submerging cameras in the water to get submarine views as compelling as Robert Ballard’s discovery of the wreck of the Titanic. Daily, Americans are breathlessly being updated on the status of a standing pool of water.
Meanwhile Trump is blaming intentional sabotage — a crew of wreckers have apparently been destroying the pool, cutting gashes in the pool floor, dumping in toxic chemicals, and spreading bad vibes overall . . . at least if you believe Trump. But of course nobody does; it is in fact more or less priced in by now that Trump will simply lie through his teeth rather than admit to anything that might make him look like a failure. (See: Iran.) These charges barely need to be addressed — suffice it to say the Reflecting Pool is under high-res video surveillance 24 hours a day, and I doubt law enforcement professionals have been lazy about reviewing footage.
Now, at Trump’s order, the National Guard and U.S. Park Police are patrolling the Mall — to defend the pool. (From what? Sunlight?) And today the National Park Service has begun erecting a chain-link fence around the entire pool, to fight off people whom President Trump has dubbed “Pro-Algae Protestors.” (Presumably the FBI has also issued an APB for Swamp Thing.)
This is all so pathetic — both the media’s obsession with the Reflecting Pool and Trump’s bleating inability to admit that he blew it. (When you delegate a task, you’re responsible for whom you choose to delegate it to. Trump clearly chose poorly.) Rather obviously, Trump hasn’t been sabotaged by anything except shoddy workmanship and the laws of photosynthesis.
I don’t want to talk about this boring scandal anymore. It’s everything I expect from both Trump and the mainstream media. I don’t want to be a part of it. I don’t want to talk about the fact that the guy who got the no-bid contract to do the resurfacing and sealing job on the Reflecting Pool is a six-figure Trump donor who looks exactly like the sort of guy who would charge elevated rates for slipshod work — that would be a cheap shot. So instead I’ll simply suggest that if the Reflecting Pool is still fenced off, away from the tourists who will be in Washington for the July 4 weekend, it will be yet another unerasable black mark on a record so filled with them that the page is now one giant smudge of ink.