If everyone in the United States weren't living downstream from its consequences, it would be a pretty good tragic flaw that Donald Trump wants more than anything to be seen as a brilliant man who has always been right about everything when he is transparently a butterfingered dunce whose professional expertise more or less begins and ends at making cutting remarks from a safe distance and directing other people to file nuisance lawsuits on his behalf. If assessed from a sufficient remove, the spread between the opening proposition—the man who knows more about every subject than any expert without even having to study or even pay attention to any of it, because he is just that much of a natural talent—and the relentlessly oafish output is a great bit, if admittedly also a bit one-note.
Lots of awful people are like this, and a great percentage of the degenerate gentry that is Trump's truest and most durable base is extremely like this: Dumb old bullies all grandiose and soft from golf and infidelity; illiterate real-estate types with detailed opinions on The Differences Between The Races; the luridly unemployable adult children of car-dealership guys; anhedonic beneficiaries of a good investment or two who have, through sheer restless indolence and various dull biases, backed into some truly berserk and totally bespoke authoritarian worldviews. Aging phone addicts who think the country "needs a pharaoh." Ruddy tax evaders who fear cities and are insecure about their boats. None of these people really do things especially well, and all of them are visibly getting worse, but they are all far enough from experiencing any kind of consequences that they can't really imagine failing at anything they try.
This mindset scales all the way up to some of the most powerful people in human history, but it is the same all the way down. It amounts to the belief that only these particular wimpy pink goofs, each one the protagonist of reality, can be entrusted to run things, and that any problem can be solved by telling some underling to handle it, and also to the idea that such an order becomes a glorious and vindicating solution immediately after it is issued. Nothing that follows will ever be their fault. Provided you do not care about or pay attention to the world, this worldview absolutely rocks.
From a certain perspective, most obviously one on D.C.'s National Mall, the Trump administration's attempt to make over the reflecting pool by the Lincoln Memorial has been a disaster. It begins with a classic Trump-style category error, which is more or less that the pool's intended architectural purpose—as a "water mirror" that reflects its surroundings and the sky above, as a similar feature does at the Taj Mahal—runs counter to Donald Trump's personal understanding of what a pool is, which is "thing filled with swimming pool-colored water."
What this was, in retrospect, was another problem that only Trump could fix. When the administration threw some no-bid contracts to some pool guys Trump had worked with before to repair the leaking and murky basin, it was done with the goal of bringing the reflecting pool more in line with this Trumpy ideal. His bold and singular solution for the pool not being blue enough was to have its bottom painted a dark blue color of Trump's choosing, which he named American Flag Blue. "This was not a paint job," Trump posted on his personal social media platform. "This was highly sophisticated material, industrial strength, that could last for 100 years, applied by very talented people, many of whom came from the Great State of Oklahoma, where I won 77 out of 77 Counties, THREE TIMES, the only President to ever do so. The material is thick, strong, flexible, and has a natural, beautiful color, the dark blue of the American Flag!"
Within a day of the resurfaced and repainted pool being refilled, National Parks Service employees could be seen removing algae blooms from its surface. A week in, the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool is, pardon the hydrological jargon, "all fucked up."
Specifically, the water is more or less the color of a sour apple Jolly Rancher now. It looks like they're brewing Yodas in there. It is so uncannily green and visibly slimy that it feels inevitable that video will soon surface of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. splashing around in it with jeans on. It looks like the aftermath of Boston Tea Party-style political action involving matcha. Parks service employees have been busy dredging and raking algae from the bottom; on Tuesday, they were seen dumping jugs of 12 percent hydrogen peroxide solution into the pool. Per a coworker who was at the reflecting pool earlier today, the water still remains the color of Slimer, from Ghostbusters. In a statement, the White House blamed "residual algae" in the pipes for the fact that the reflecting pool is currently the color of lime Jell-O, adding "President Donald J. Trump is an expert builder who has fixed the Reflecting Pool for good unlike the failed and extremely costly attempt by Obama and Biden."
Some of this, to be fair, is just something that happens in recently refilled pools, and some of it is inherent to the challenges of putting a stagnant body of water in the middle of a boggy city during a hot and humid stretch of weather. But the Canadian pool expert Steve "Swimming Pool Steve" Goodale told Washingtonian magazine that a good deal of the problem is down to Trump's fix, which darkened the color of the pool, which in turn traps more heat, which promotes algae growth. "If we change nothing else except the color, and we go from a lighter color to a darker color, absolutely you're going to have more prolific algae growth," Goodale told Washingtonian. "It's a foregone conclusion." Hans Paerl, a professor of Marine and Environmental Sciences at the University of North Carolina, told USA Today that he expects the reflecting pool to remain greenish to jarringly green into the fall, when temperatures will come down somewhat. "It's Mother Nature that’s really running the show," Paerl said.
It is not the worst thing about it by a long shot, but the second Trump administration has been an unqualified victory in his lifelong war against metaphor. Every filthy stupid thing that happens is happening in the open, now: Captains of industry line up to shake Trump's hand at the big birthday party he threw for himself, while his fans brawl with each other on the other side of a barricade; every new blast of rank and ancient bigotry or proudly pig-stupid backwardness arrives without euphemism or qualification. Trump is not just figuratively walling himself off from the rest of Washington, D.C., and glowering down at its residents, he is literally doing all those things.
Disfiguring public spaces on a whim fits within Trump's program of relentless, reckless literalism. Claiming, as an administration spokesperson did earlier today, that the algae bloom has been "successfully destroyed" when the reflecting pool still looks like someone recently boiled spinach in it, reflects, among other things, how thoroughly he has already moved on. As far as Trump is concerned, the problem was solved when he decided upon a solution; it immediately and irrevocably became everyone else's problem the moment he stopped thinking about it. Other people will be charged with doing the dirty work of cleaning up his mess for some time to come, and life will go on in the stink and shadow of this ruinous and tossed-off fix until then. Not much of a metaphor there, either.
