The president has created a visible symbol of the perils of his headlong style.
When the going gets rough in politics, mishap becomes metaphor.
Rarely has that been truer than with President Donald Trump’s botched makeover of the National Mall’s Reflecting Pool, which has indeed become a reflection — of his priorities, his impulses and his assertion of authority and power in his second term.
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On an iconic site where some of the most stirring moments in the nation’s history have taken place, the American public is seeing images of Gatorade-green water filled with algae, floating peels of paint in a shade the president dubbed “American Flag Blue” — and even a dead duck.
The contrast from what Trump promised in April, when he announced his plan to repair and refurbish the pool, has been nightmarish. Its problems go back to its creation. The pool was constructed without underlying support in the 1920s on reclaimed marshland; the swamp has slowly been taking it back ever since.
Citing his background as a master builder, Trump quoted rejected estimates that repairing the pool would take 3½ years and more than $300 million.
Instead, “our job will take one week and will cost about a million and a half dollars and people said, ‘Wow,’” the president told reporters. “And here’s the only difference. … The difference is, this is much better. This will last 30, 40, 50 years.”
The price tag quickly escalated to its current $14 million, and the time frame became six weeks. Trump, as is his wont, bypassed normal, legally required processes and awarded no-bid contracts to vendors with whom he had previous ties. The administration claimed the urgency was justified because the work had to get done by America’s 250th birthday, though that deadline also appears to have gone by the wayside.
All of which is an object lesson as to why the procedures that Trump has disdained exist in the first place.
“The whole reason for the process is for agencies to stop, look and listen before they proceed with actions that might impact historic properties, and it’s hard to imagine a more historic landscape than the National Mall,” said Sara Bronin, a George Washington University law professor who chaired the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, an independent federal agency, during the Biden administration. “The fact that the president proceeded without going through the process of evaluating what this physical improvement might affect meant that he basically risked what we’re seeing today.”
Trump has scoffed at efforts by earlier presidents to fix the Reflecting Pool, including a $34 million attempt during the Obama administration, in which it was closed for two years. But had he been less contemptuous and more curious, Trump might have better understood what he was up against. Within weeks of the pool’s 2012 reopening, the waters were filling with algae, just as they are now.
For Trump, “there is this incessant focus on confirming his own greatness, and so when these go bad, as in this particular case, it reminds people of his superficiality,” said historian John A. Lawrence, who was chief of staff for former speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) from 2005 to 2013.
But Doug Heye, a longtime Republican operative based in Washington, said he doubts many Americans are even paying much attention to the state of the 2,028-foot-long water basin that connects the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial. “It’s a massive, massive waste of time with a D.C. media that can’t get enough of it,” Heye said. “If you get outside of four miles from where we are all sitting, no one is talking about it.”
Heye acknowledged, however, that the president is giving fuel to the storyline, because he can’t seem to stop commenting on it, which “can send a signal to voters: ‘I don’t know what’s important to you. This is what’s important to me.’”
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From his days as a real estate developer, Trump has been known for an obsessive regard for the appearances of his surroundings. Former aides recall that during his 2016 presidential campaign, he was known to stop his motorcade if he noticed that the U.S. flag at one of his properties had been hung a foot or two from the top of its pole, and demand that it be fixed.
He decided to rehabilitate the Reflecting Pool, Trump has said, after a friend visiting from Germany told him “it’s filthy-dirty. The water is disgusting looking. It’s not representative of the country.”
The Reflecting Pool debacle also fits within Trump’s broader second-term desire to mark his place in history as a great figure.
That legacy-building impulse has expressed itself as an urge to put his name, his image and his brand on whatever he can in Washington. When a reporter asked him last year about a triumphal arch he was building near Arlington National Cemetery and whom he was building it for, Trump had a ready answer: “Me. It’s going to be beautiful.”
Privately, Trump has also mused about the possibility of topping the arch with a replica of his own fist, raised as he cried “Fight! Fight! Fight!” after a 2024 assassination attempt, according to an account in “Regime Change,” a newly published book about his second term by New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan.
His projects and likeness dot the landscape throughout downtown Washington, from the destruction of the White House East Wing to make room for a huge new ballroom, to a giant banner with his face on it that hangs from the Justice Department headquarters, to the renaming an organization created decades ago by Congress as “Donald J. Trump United States Institute of Peace.” Last week, under a federal judge’s order, Trump’s name was taken off the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts, but the facade’s change remains hidden by scaffolding and tarp.
His administration has established tax-free investment vehicles for children dubbed “Trump accounts,” ordered a new fleet of “Trump class” battleships that some military experts deem obsolete, set up a “Trump RX” program to lower prescription drug prices. His image is on passes to national parks, where the administration has also eliminated free admission on federal holidays for Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Juneteenth, while adding Flag Day, which is not an official holiday but happens to be Trump’s birthday.
Trump has also pressed for New York’s Penn Station and the Washington area’s Dulles International Airport to be named for him, at one point briefly threatening to hold up already appropriated funding for a commuter tunnel between New Jersey and New York City to get his way. Under a Florida law passed earlier this year, Palm Beach International Airport, roughly five miles from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home, will officially be renamed the President Donald J. Trump International Airport in July.
The president blames vandals, not poor planning or the contractors he picked, for the problems that have beset his Reflecting Pool project. But his administration has yet to produce evidence to back his claim.
Trump continues to insist that things are going, well, swimmingly.
“The Reflecting Pool is fantastic,” he told reporters Tuesday. “I just got pictures of it and it’s beautiful.”
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