Narcissus was cursed to fall in love with his own reflection in a pool of water. Donald Trump is finding that his effort to overhaul the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool in Washington has turned into a perverse tourist attraction and 2,028ft national metaphor.
On Monday afternoon a massive algae bloom had turned the pool a green reminiscent of a plane passenger clutching a sick bag. It also stank, but that did not deter a steady flow of curious tourists snapping photos and TV crews doing eyewitness interviews about the folly of Donald Trump’s $14.7m renovation.
“He has a contrary of the Midas touch, which is everything he touches becomes crap,” said José Lebron, 32, a local tour guide standing poolside. “I’m worried because now the point of visiting the pool is seeing the whole spectacle of the mistake. It’s not enjoying what the pool actually is meant for, which is a reflective space.”
The pool was designed more than a century ago to connect the Washington Monument with the Lincoln Memorial, Lebron added. “Now we’re not talking about that; now we’re analysing what a bad job it is, how it’s peeling, how the animals are dying, that it’s not a healthy ecosystem, that the algae are blooming. I don’t like that changing conversation. It feels like personification of this whole thing.”
Trump, who has been seeking to overhaul much of Washington, claimed he would clean, beautify and reinforce the reflecting pool, saying it had become dilapidated and dirty because of previous presidents’ neglect. He awarded a no-bid contract to a company that he said had previously done work on swimming pools at one of his golf clubs.
Yet within weeks of Trump declaring the rehabilitation complete with an “American flag blue” coating in time for the 250th anniversary of independence on 4 July, the water was plagued by a vivid green algae bloom that clouded the pool’s coating. A roughly 4ft piece of the new dark-blue liner was seen partially floating in the pool last Friday.
Facing humiliation, the president has claimed saboteurs caused a 300ft-long gash in the pool, illegally polluted it with chemicals and marked a giant 86 47 (slang for getting rid of Trump) into nearby grass. At least five people are said to have been arrested, including former Olympic canoeist David Hearn, who publicly denied the charges. Trump has threatened the culprits with 10 years in jail.
Questioned by reporters in the Oval Office on Monday, the president said: “We had vandalism. It’s not a lot of damage, but we’ll probably have to let the water out and re-fix it. They went in there with a knife. I was just told by the people over at Parks, five people are arrested, and five people are under investigation right now – and it’s a sad thing.”
The company responsible for the renovation work, Virginia-based Atlantic Industrial Coatings, has said the areas that required repairs made up “a very small part of the massive 7-acre (2.83-hectare) project, and do not indicate a failure of the liner”.
But the pool, once lined with crowds listening to Martin Luther King declare “I have a dream”, currently looks as murky as the Washington swamp. Algae, leaves and scraps of litter floated in one corner, while a beleaguered duck paddled nearby. Passersby stopped at the water’s edge to peer down, with no hope of seeing their own reflection.
Jessica Diaz, 53, a nurse practitioner visiting from Jupiter, Florida, snapped a photo of the pool on her phone. “A little cloudy, a little murky, a little disappointing,” she said. “Different bacteria and whatnot that take away from the beauty of it and the symbolism of it. It puts things in not a very great light. It makes things kind of dark. We’re a bright nation. We’re young but we’re bright, we’re strong. It’s a little sad.”
Sherry O’Keefe, 69, a therapist, used the phrase “not impressed” eight times as she described her reaction to Trump’s handiwork, adding: “I’m not a fan of anybody that wants to say, ‘Look at me, look at the wonderful things I’ve done, look at my wonderful reflecting pool!’
“I’m not sure that I would have liked the reflecting pool if we hadn’t had a massive algae bloom, but the fact that we have had a massive algae bloom that is now resulting in people being arrested for touching the water, or touching any of the paint that might be coming up off the bottom, reflects that we’ve got somebody who is more concerned with appearances than with actuality.”
The reflecting pool is hardly the most urgent issue facing the US as the Trump administration negotiates an end to the war in Iran, grapples with high inflation and braces for midterm elections. Yet its symbolic power, as a stagnant pond beneath the gaze of Abraham Lincoln’s marble statue, is irresistible for the president’s critics. Even an image of a dead duck in the pool went viral on social media over the weekend.
Trump regarded the pool as an easy way to embarrass the Barack Obama administration, deflect attention from the Iran war and embrace his identity as a builder, according to George Derek Musgrove, co-author of Chocolate City: A History of Race and Democracy in the Nation’s Capital.
“Once he got involved and insisted on a specific fix that didn’t actually address the problem of algae blooms, and doled out a very questionable no-bid contract to an inexperienced contractor, it started to get this stink of corruption,” said Musgrove. “And now, in order to cover up all of his very embarrassing choices about this issue, he’s having people arrested just for touching a piece of the blue paint that has peeled off, and therefore creating yet another crisis which is a clear demonstration of the weaponisation of law enforcement in order to cover up his stupidity and his mistakes.”
He added: “Much like the Epstein files, he has created an issue that’s deeply embarrassing to him and, even in his effort to cover it up, he is recreating and amplifying that same issue.”
Trump paid little attention to the District of Columbia during his first term. But since returning to power last year he has demolished the East Wing of the White House to make way for a ballroom, taken over the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts (only to have his name removed from its facade) and unveiled plans for a triumphal arch. The Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool, however, could provide his political epitaph.
Sidney Blumenthal, a Lincoln biographer and former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, remarked: “Trump has wanted a monument to himself in Washington and he finally has one. It is this reflecting pool and it is a perfect metaphor of kleptocracy, failure, incompetence, a complete mess and it stands before the Lincoln Memorial, which he seeks to overshadow with his arch of triumph after losing the Iran war.
“He wants to put his name on everything else. Why won’t he create a sign in gold with his name calling this the Trump Reflecting Pool? Because it is truly his reflecting pool.”