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Trump’s Reflecting Pool Renovations Are a Total Disaster

The president’s attempt to make his mark on the National Mall has become a big, wet mess.

The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool appears green due to algae growth after it was painted blue.

It would be a bit too on the nose for our malignant-narcissist president to be undone by a reflecting pool, yet who are we to argue with the designs of the gods? Just two months into Donald Trump’s impulsive, ignorant, and cronyist campaign to renovate the pool at the Lincoln Memorial, the whole $14 million boondoggle has collapsed into a paint-flaking, algae-blooming shit show. Rarely has the term “quagmire” been more apt for an executive-branch undertaking.

Trump, ever keen to shift blame to phantom formations of MAGA underminers and “lunatic leftists,” claims that the unsightly neon-green fiasco he’s overseen is actually the handiwork of malicious vandals—without bothering to cite any evidence, let alone to explain how these cunning agents of chaos have mastered the art of telepathically unsealing underwater paint or causing algae to proliferate. Nevertheless, under Trump’s deranged command, law enforcement officials and National Guard members have started to arrest passersby, even though the members of this menacing fifth column seem in most cases to have done nothing more than put their hands in the water; in one notorious case, the pool police arrested a 67-year-old three-time Olympian canoer for touching a paint chip that had peeled off of its own accord.

Among other things, the pool debacle is a tidy set piece showcasing Trump’s militant disregard of basic information that doesn’t plump his mogul vanity. The self-serving fable that he’s heroically rescuing the Reflecting Pool from years of neglect at the hands of Barack Obama and Joe Biden of course overlooks his own first term, which would at a minimum have been a caretaker regime in this Democratic campaign of pool neglect. And after awarding massive no-bid contracts to insiders (including his comically corrupt air-filtration crony John J. Cafaro), Trump’s been suitably owned by working-class pool technicians who actually know about how algae proliferates. While rain and environmental contamination are key factors stoking algae blooms, they thrive especially in conditions of heat. As the YouTube pool tech Swimming Pool Steve explains, “The recent........

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