Trump's inept attempts to "fix" Reflecting Pool only highlight his authoritarian fixations
The president's plan to spruce up a tourist attraction has mutated into self-serving claims of anti-American vandalism in the heart of D.C. and over-the-top charges against a sacrificial citizen
This piece was previously published at The Hot Screen.
Since his election to a second term as president, Donald Trump has ruled as an aspiring tyrant. Alongside the most serious carnage — the attacks on the rule of law, the continued effort to subvert elections, the tendency to view the U.S. Treasury as a piggy bank and the presidency as the world’s best opportunity for grift, ever — the president has conducted an arguably less serious but potent secondary attack at an symbolic level. I am thinking first and foremost of his efforts to remodel the White House, renovations of which were of course a non-issue in the 2024 presidential race — but you wouldn’t know it to see the prioritization the president has put on such projects as emblazoning the Oval Office in gold, obliterating the Rose Garden, and razing the East Wing to make way for a bribery scheme under cover of a ginormous ballroom set to dwarf the actual presidential residence.
The overriding message of the White House demolitions and general enshitification are tightly bound up with the meaning of the Trump administration writ large, in that they are demonstrations that Donald Trump does not consider himself a temporary caretaker of the republic so much as the new owner of what he sometimes seems to conceive of as a very big casino with nuclear weapons (Talking Point Memo’s Josh Marshall has written extensively and incisively about the phenomenon of Trump’s sense of national ownership). He does seem to think that the White House literally belongs to him, to do with what he will — and that this authorizes major modifications which cannot be easily undone by his successors.
The intended construction of a ballroom is the standout White House-specific offense, given the mass demolition it has required, the apparent lawlessness of the destruction, and that its purpose appears simultaneously be to siphon bribes under cover of construction costs, to stick taxpayers with a huge chunk of the cost, and to eventually serve as a venue to entertain and audition those who have given Trump bribes, those who want to give him bribes, and even those who are simply bribe curious. It’s both a symbolic assertion of the president’s ownership of public goods (goodbye, shared memories of a normal-looking White House) and a practical tool for ruling like a despot (no self-respecting tyrant lacks for a ballroom where supplicants might wheedle and grovel).
But the president’s sense of direct ownership doesn’t stop at the White House gates. Since early in his administration, he’s adopted a sadistically proprietary attitude towards the entirety of the nation’s capital, in which his purported desire to beautify the city has fused together with his authoritarian aesthetic and his desire to rule with an iron fist (indeed, U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro recently remarked that beautification is meant “as a defense against “anarchy” and “civil disorder”). And so, proclaiming out-of-control crime on Washington streets, Trump has leveraged his control over the D.C. National Guard to deploy troops within the nation’s capital — an assertion of power at once ominous (i.e., the out-of-control crime canard as justification for the intimidation and possible beat-down of protestors) and ridiculous (as soldiers have been deployed to low-crime neighborhoods and tasked with such urgent assignments as picking up trash).
But the deployment of troops to pick up litter was an early indication that Trump truly was interested in “cleaning up the streets” on multiple levels. Indeed, he has embarked on a quest to beautify the capital in accordance with his own strange standards, sometimes under cover of the country’s 250th anniversary celebrations but always to advance his own vision and interests.
Which brings us to the increasingly disturbing tale of the president’s unsuccessful attempts to “fix” the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, which is visited by more than 20 million people every year. The first level of weirdness, the one that I would guess first caught most people’s attention, is the same one that haunts other chores that we might refer to as “presidential housekeeping”: in a way it’s hard to imagine previous chief executives behaving, Trump was concerning himself intimately with the color and contents of a small, ornamental body of water. And as if the universe itself had arranged to highlight the point that water management is not a primary presidential responsibility, Trump chose to do so at the same time as he was conducting an illegal, and ultimately disastrous, war against the nation of Iran.
As most readers likely know by now, Trump’s attempts to spruce up the Reflecting Pool — including by ordering that the bottom surface be painted blue in order to produce a color pleasing to the discerning executive eye — have gone badly wrong at a basic technical level. The culmination (to date) has been a body of water blooming with algae, bestirred with scraps of sealant, and certainly not sporting a soul-soothing azure.
But far more troubling have been events beneath the surface, so to speak. The project has seen massive cost overruns: the president claimed that improvements would cost perhaps $2 million, but so far, the government has spent a minimum of $14 million on the work. A recent New York Times piece provided one possible explanation for the cost and subsequent shoddy workmanship, as it turns out that “a business tied to a longtime supporter of President Trump was given a no-bid contract to install a water-purification system.”
More ominous has been the way that Trump has sought to cover up his self-made Reflecting Pool debacle by spinning a counter-narrative which holds that shadowy and malevolent anti-American forces are actually responsible for the pool’s sickly state. In a recent episode of The Daily Blast, host Greg Sargent and Ankush Khardori discussed the president’s outlandish, unverified claims that some six people have been arrested for crimes against the pool, and another seven issued citations. Most memorably, the president has repeatedly claimed that a vandal had cut a “gash” hundreds of feet long in the pool’s sealant (the size of the slice grew larger with each presidential recitation of the crime, eventually reaching a whopping 350 feet).
Worse still, the president has pushed to make reality fit his fantastical parable, with troops and other security deployed to the site, and fencing arrayed, to “protect” it. Startlingly, at least one American has in fact been ensnared by Trump’s web of paranoia and dissimulation. Last week, the Justice Department charged David Hearn with a single count of felony destruction of property, with the details of his arrest and alleged crime failing to pass the laugh test. The government claims that Hearn, a former Olympic canoeist, made a “a violent effort to rip up the sealant from the bottom of the pool [. . .] with his bare hands.” Hearn denies the outlandish and improbable charges, with his attorneys attributing them to “the administration’s effort to shift blame for their own failures”— which seems exactly right. To shield Trump from full public understanding of his own responsibility for the Reflecting Pool quagmire, his minions are now seeking to make an innocent man appear guilty of absurd crimes. If convicted, Hearn could face up to 10 years in prison.
In summary: to cover up his own incompetence and corruption, the president has pretended that a tourist site within the nation’s capital has been under attack by forces unknown, fortified said site to back up his lies, and ensnared a very likely innocent American in an effort to prove the truth of his slanders. Is there any question that Hearn would be free and clear of harassment by the state if Trump had not chosen to focus his baleful gaze on the Reflecting Pool, and infected its refurbishment with his lawlessness and limitless desire for “retribution”?
So long as Hearn remains in legal jeopardy, this story is not over. It is certainly no longer a funny one. This is an abuse of power no less dangerous for being so fantastically stupid. Even in the most superficially benign area — the restoration of the Reflecting Pool — Trump’s corruption, incompetence, and authoritarian tendencies have come together to endanger the citizenry. It is tempting to say that the Reflecting Pool is a metaphorical whirlpool that’s sucking in Trump, but really it’s just the latest manifestation of his limitless immorality and danger to the country. His dream of total control over what he “owns,” combined with the urgent need to cover up his own incompetence, have driven him inexorably to textbook tyrannical behavior. It’s like he can’t help rubbing our noses in his authoritarianism, creating an utterly backwards situation where his supposed goal of beautifying Washington becomes cover for new ways to brutalize ordinary citizens.
The silver lining, if we can call it that, is that the inanity of Trump’s Reflecting Pool obsession and his disproportionate, hysterical response to his own mess seems to repel most Americans. As Paul Waldman observes, Trump has been drawn into a spectacle of public humiliation very much of his own making. Even as ordinary Americans like Hearn are facing life-changing consequences due to Trump’s obsessions, ordinary people can easily grasp that what the president is doing is the opposite of presidential. The case is there for the opposition to hammer home, through the midterms and beyond: no aspect of America, not even the innocuous Reflecting Pool, is safe from being transformed into another tool in Trump’s bottomless quest to plunder, defile, and dominate our nation.