The Reflecting Pool debacle

The Reflecting Pool debacle becomes a national flash point
Liberals think it encapsulates the Trump administration. Conservatives think it’s blown out of proportion.

Justin Klawans, The Week US's avatar
By Justin Klawans, The Week US

Visitors observe the algae-covered reflecting pool at the Lincoln Memorial.
The Reflecting Pool’s visuals ‘can capture the public imagination’
(Image credit: Tasos Katopodis / Getty Images)

With the White House in murky waters due to ongoing changes to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool that have caused unmitigated algae growth and peeling paint, many liberals claim President Donald Trump’s obsession with the pool encapsulates the mayhem of his administration. Many conservatives, conversely, say liberals are obsessed with the minute details of the presidential pond.

‘Another story typical of the Trump era’

The images of “workers vacuuming algae out of the pool, oily green slime, a dead duckling floating in the muck — these visuals can capture the public imagination, even among Americans largely fed up with and tuned out of politics,” Michelle Cottle said at The New York Times. Genuine policy decisions like the Iran war “upend more lives, but those policy failures take a lot of intellectual and emotional bandwidth to process.” But someone “wasting a pile of money on a shoddy remodel? Everyone gets how pathetic and hilarious that is.”

When the renovations began, they “resembled a common Trump narrative: Hubris and corruption combining to leave things worse than when he started,” and the “symbolism of Trump creating a real-life swamp was almost too perfect,” said James Downie at MS NOW. The situation has in time become “another story typical of the Trump era: the abuse of state prosecutorial power,” a reference to several people who have been arrested for allegedly vandalizing the pool (Trump has not provided evidence for these allegations).

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Trump has “fully embraced the dubious proposition that left-wing vandalism is at fault” for the pool’s problems, said Dion Lefler at The Wichita Eagle. To “say that Trump’s explanation is implausible is an insult to implausibility,” especially because the “only ones ever spotted pouring corrosive chemicals into the pool were federal workers” in an attempt to kill the algae. “In Donald Trump’s America, presidential incompetence is never an acceptable explanation for anything.”

‘Far more important stories unfolding’
Democrats “love to see a Trump administration fiasco coming,” said Nicole Russell at USA Today. The president’s “attempt to revive the faltering Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool” has “become the left’s newest obsession,” even when there are “far more important stories unfolding.” The Democratic focus on the Reflecting Pool is the “perfect metaphor for the way the left and much of the media have handled the Trump administration.”

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The Reflecting Pool has been problematic long before Trump. It is “almost impossible to maintain the water level that is required to make the pool reflective,” Kym Hall, a former National Capital Area director for the National Park Service, told The New York Times last month, because it’s “like pouring water into a colander.” There are “many, many things to criticize about our 45th and 47th president, but it cannot be the case that literally everything the man does is wrong,” said the National Review editors.

The renovations are part of a “D.C. beautification project ahead of the nation’s 250th birthday,” and “statues and fountains across the federal city have been cleaned and restored,” Susan Ferrechio said at The Washington Times. Liberals, who have been “aided by dogged media coverage of the pool’s problems and cost, gleefully framed the peeling paint and algae blooms as a symbol of alleged Trump administration failures.” Trump, however, claims his “project was far less expensive, took less time and was far more successful than those of his Democratic predecessors.”