The Reflecting Pool Story Has Gotten Too Profoundly Stupid to Ignore
The saddest thing about our President is that he'd rather look like the most desperate liar on Earth rather than simply admit when something goes wrong.
Photo via Unsplash, Harrison Mitchell Splinter Donald Trump
You have no idea how staunchly I have fought, for weeks upon weeks, to avoid writing anything about the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool visited by millions each year as they walk the National Mall in Washington D.C. The announcement that the Trump administration would be renovating the pool after the always eloquent Trump declared it ugly and gross in early April was a near-perfect example of the sort of story (and Epstein distraction) that left-leaning legacy media, and the Bluesky-centric liberal influencer commentariat cannot resist: A symbolic affront to act patriotically aggrieved about, despite the fact that the Trump administration would be doing more or less the same types of renovation to the D.C. landmark that multiple other administrations have attempted (and at least partially failed at) before him.
The Obama administration (he of the just-opened Obamalisk), after all, did indeed spend $34 million entirely reconstructing the pool between 2010-2012, addressing some of the pool’s glaring architectural flaws (like the fact that it’s built on inherently unstable land), but that didn’t stop algae from immediately blooming all over the thing when they were done. The Trump admin’s subsequent architectural/logistical failures with the pool, then, are less notable than they are purely predictable–of course they botched it as well. But it’s the response of the President of the United States to the incompetence he himself filled the government with that finally took this story to a critical mass of stupidity this weekend, and made it into something I now have to finally address. The reflecting pool story has become a perfect microcosm of his own tenure in office: Constant failure and constant embarrassment, warded off by delusional alternate history and direct threats against invented enemies.
But let’s start with Trump’s vision for the pool:
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If you’ve been following the ever-trudging story of the renovation, then you already know some of the basics: The Trump admin engaged in some classic crony capitalism in an attempt to rush-job the reflecting pool renovation in time for America 250 celebrations in D.C.–not that it matters now, given that pretty much every performer has canceled. They gave a no-bid contract for less than $2 million to a pool company owned by a Trump booster, and costs then immediately ballooned to roughly $16 million at this point. The bottom of the pool was coated in an “American flag blue”-colored sealant meant to stop leaking, although more than anything it was probably meant to help convey an aesthetically pleasing blue appearance to the water, as the optics-obsessed Trump had been fixated on cloudy, less-than-pristine water. Ironically, this darker material almost certainly contributed to raising the pool’s temperature and promoting a massive bloom of green algae as soon as it was refilled, prompting the Trump admin to immediately begin dumping hydrogen peroxide in it. Then, to add insult to injury, the blue sealant itself began seemingly peeling off in strips and chunks all over the pool, leading Trump to declare that it may need to be drained all over again.
On its own, this would just be a tale of bad contractors attempting to get a job done too quickly, which is hardly new for any President’s administration, and I wouldn’t want to waste oxygen on it in comparison to stories such as a congressman who has disappeared off the face of the Earth for three months, or Trump handwaving the deaths of 170 Iranian kids. But Trump, eternally committed to his soul’s exhortation that he make every situation ten times worse and more objectively embarrassing, simply couldn’t leave well enough alone. The idea that his chosen workers could have simply botched such a job is not something he could allow to stand: It has to be the fault of his political enemies. Everything–the algae, the peeling sealant, the constantly ballooning costs–must be blamed on not just poor luck but outright sabotage. And that’s how we end up with a conspiratorial POTUS declaring this weekend that “many” people are currently being arrested for “the disgraceful vandalism” of the reflecting pool, including people who supposedly somehow “put a 250 foot long gash into the beautiful facade,” using “some form of knife or blade.” Just look at this deranged rambling, from a guy whose attention should probably be on the Iranian negotiators he’s currently threatening with death.
As if it even needs to be said, Trump did not bother to offer any actual evidence of the saboteurs supposedly cutting a football field’s worth of slashes into the reflecting pool, which feels like the sort of thing that a security camera might notice as it was happening. He did, however, promise “years in jail” or possibly death to those he decides are guilty of the crime, saying they would be “dealt with accordingly” for “a true affront to Presidents George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.” I can already imagine the ghost of the Great Emancipator, pacing the White House’s Lincoln Bedroom and howling for revenge.
As if they were intent on selecting the worst possible face for the supposed sabotage campaign against the pool, the National Guard managed to find the most sympathetic person on Earth to arrest for the crime: 67-year-old, three-time U.S. Olympian David Hearn, who just happened to be visiting the reflecting pool over the weekend when he stopped to touch a piece of the detached blue sealant/coating out of curiosity. He was subsequently arrested and held for five hours, accused of destroying government property, a crime that carries a prison sentence of up to 10 years. But hey, we need some sacrificial lambs, even if they represented the country at multiple Olympics!
“I didn’t remove, tear, rip, break or destroy any of it,” said Hearn, describing the encounter. “The condition of the reflecting pool was the same after I stepped away from the water as it was before I got there. All of a sudden they were handcuffing me behind my back, and they hadn’t really told me what I was charged with I was just a curious, concerned citizen. I guess I was there at the wrong place, wrong time.”
Is there anything more purely Trump than ending up in a position where you’re forced to pretend that an elderly former Olympian is a grave threat to national security, because the alternative would be admitting that your pool guys didn’t do such a great job on something? Well, maybe–you could argue it’s an even more Trumpy move to install a curtain over your removed name on the Kennedy Center and then just leave it there for weeks, for instance. But in my eyes, the most Trumpy move of all is to create an entire alternate history regarding the reflecting pool, to be disseminated to right-wing media and influencers, in which you pretend that no one is allowed to touch the landmark, and that the landmark never properly functioned for 104 years until Trump waved his hands to fix it. Over the course of the last week, the online MAGA hordes have been hard at work on both of those narratives.
At the Reflecting Pool and guys
— Glen Weldon (@ghweldon.bsky.social) 5:05 PM · Jun 20, 2026
The first point, that it’s somehow illegal to touch or interact with the pool, is classic MAGA embrace of the police state, flying in the face of a century of documented photo and video evidence. Visitors in D.C. have always interacted with the pool even if one is not technically supposed to do so. Any time you’re there, you’ll see people soaking their feet on a hot day. In the winter, people routinely ice skate on it despite being directed not to. Countless photos depict huge crowds of people wading through the pool during big events on the National Mall, or groups of kids playing in it. But as of this week, MAGA is now supposed to immediately start repeating that touching the water there is a grave federal offense.
This embrace of delusion goes all the way down to the administration attempting to rewrite the basic, physical properties of water itself. Look at Trump in the ramble above, for instance, claiming that for the first time in 104 years, the pool is now “reflecting the two Great Monuments, which it never had before.” Ignore the classic Trumpian Random Capitalizations for a moment, and acknowledge that the President of the United States is claiming that for the past century, water in the pool somehow failed to reflect, despite the fact that this is what water fucking does, and the fact that there are endless images of the pool doing exactly that, because, as you may recall, this is what water fucking does. Being MAGA once again ultimately comes down to being told not just to ignore the evidence of your eyes and ears, but to ignore and denounce everything you understood yesterday about physics and optics in order to agree with the President’s rewriting of reality. If Trump declared gravity nonexistent tomorrow, they would begin rewriting the elementary school science curriculum in Florida accordingly.
But here we are anyway, with $16 million now sunk into the project, and it increasingly looking like it will all need to be done over again–who knows how many bystanders will need to be arrested, or how much Trump’s confederates will manage to line their pockets, before all is said and done. Trump seems a little hazy on those details himself, judging from his most recent Truth Social post on the subject, which concludes with the use of a question mark instead of what was surely intended to be an exclamation point: “We will fix it?” What a fitting Freudian slip from the confidence-projecting POTUS who remains, in reality, even more fragile than the coating his lackeys have applied to the bottom of this pool.
I’d say that this hopefully means I’ll never have to dedicate any thought to this particular subject again, but I know I’m not that lucky. You should probably check back here in three months, when watch towers and sniper nests have been installed in a ring around the pool to keep children from dipping their toes in the national landmark, and I’ll fill you in on the administration’s latest position on the physical properties of water.
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