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Wednesday, June 24, 2026
ANNAL$ OF TRUMPI$TAN: At the Reflecting Pool, Trump turns a serene oasis into a police zone (Philip Kennicott column, WaPo June 24, 2026)
From The Washington Post:
At the Reflecting Pool, Trump turns a serene oasis into a police zone
The botched renovation and images of arrests strike at the heart of the president’s supposed reputation for competence.
Visitors at a rainswept Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool on Tuesday. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Nothing makes the scale of Washington more palpable than walking the length of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. It is some 2,000 feet long, more than a third of a mile, and when you follow the paved paths on either side, it feels more like a small lake than a man-made urban amenity. Even with the granite coping along the edges, which helps keep the water still and and reflective, it doesn’t take much wind for the surface to begin to ripple and wink in the light.
No matter how thronged with tourists and school groups, it is one of the most serene places in Washington. If you live here, you know its many moods through all four seasons, at dawn and twilight, and at night when the Washington Monument is reflected like the hour hand of some giant celestial clock.
It was anything but serene last week. Giant pumps disgorged a torrent of Shrek-green water, while tourists gawked, and authorities patrolled around the edges to prevent vandalism that, as of this writing, seemed to exist only in the mind of the man who made the whole mess, Donald Trump. People were curious — had Trump really managed to spend at least $14 million on a shoddy pool job that was already falling apart? — and they followed their curiosity down to the center of monumental Washington.
A chip of blue material mixes with algae at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool on Sunday. (Pete Kiehart/For The Washington Post)
National Guard troops shelter from the rain under a mobile camera trailer's solar panels Tuesday. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Some of them reached into the water to see if there really are scraps of blue-colored coating floating in the muck ... and suddenly they were accused of vandalism and arrested. A place that was meant to amplify the ideals of our democracy by reflecting an image of its sacred monuments was now a police zone, where cops carried out what seem to be arbitrary arrests motivated by the president’s need to blame his own mismanagement on an imaginary enemy.
This doesn’t reflect well on democracy.
The Reflecting Pool has been beset by algae blooms, as seen Monday. (Al Drago for The Washington Post)
In architecture, there is always a balance between beauty and function, and perhaps more than other types of built objects, reflecting pools skew to pure beauty. They serve the buildings reflected in them. They bring the sky and clouds down to earth and place them at our feet. The reflections they capture make the pool itself seem to disappear.
The delight of a reflecting pool is the illusion that there are two buildings framed in the picture, the real one built on terra firma, and the watery one that may seem on several glances to be just as substantial. The doubling can be scattered with the faintest trace of wind. And in that there is poetic conceit of transience, a reminder that everything we build and make and do is fleeting.
The urge to put your hand in the water is almost overwhelming. If a reflection in water hints at the ephemeral nature of all man-made things, it also gives the visitor a curious power, the ability to dispel the image with a stone or the flick of a finger. Nature has offered us a double, but we can make that double disappear; it’s mesmerizing, which explains why characters in our myths and narratives often lose themselves entirely in contemplation of reflections.
National Guard troops patrol the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool on Tuesday. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Now, the pool is the story: Its environmental quirks, a common frustration for past administrations, have soured into a fiasco.
There are good reasons not to swim or wade in the pool — and both actions are forbidden by law — but arresting people for putting their hand in the water is grotesque. And it repeats a now familiar and maddening pattern of events during Trump’s second presidency, alienating Americans from cherished institutions and beloved places. Touching water is innocent, but now it is a Trumpian crime, proving Trumpian conspiracy theories.
All of this might be funny, if it didn’t take up so much of the collective bandwidth. When I visited the Lincoln Memorial last week, I was pleasantly surprised that the old magic still works, even with the pool looking like a kale smoothie. People had come to see Lincoln, to stand where Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream” speech, where Marian Anderson’s voice soared above hate and division on a spring day in 1939. The view from the memorial’s inner chamber is one of the finest man-made vistas in the world, full of promise and possibility and just enough of the sublime to make you think that perhaps humanity can rise above tawdry things like greed and cruelty and chaos.
When the air is calm, particularly just after sunrise, and the pool offers its most pristine surface, the pool suggests another kind of power, and one too often dismissed or ignored. It is easy to disturb the surface of the water, which suggests one kind of agency. But we also have the power to leave it alone, to let it reflect back at us this fragile sense of perfect beauty.
The Reflecting Pool at sunrise on Sept. 24, 2021. (Stefani Reynolds/For The Washington Post )
In that, there is perhaps an even more telling metaphor. So much depends, in life and in government, on the collective agreement to preserve and protect, to leave beautiful things alone if they are self-sufficient in their beauty. Collectively, we can stand back and let everyone enjoy it.
It only takes one person immune to the magic to disturb the image. And Donald Trump knew a pool guy.
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