What lurks beneath Trump’s botched Reflecting Pool renovation | Editorial

The immediate problem with Washington’s algae-choked Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool is that, contrary to President Donald Trump’s typically inflated promises, it’s not reflecting much other than its hospitality to primitive aquatic life. And yet in a figurative sense, this relatively inconsequential public works project reflects the president’s excesses as faithfully as a mirror. Among them:

Narcissism: The Narcissus of myth fell in love with his own reflection in a pool of water, so it’s fitting that the same tendency lured Trump into this National Mall quagmire. Not content to quietly assess and address the feature’s deficiencies as if it’s his, well, job, the president made an ocean of a pond, insisting that repairing it would somehow simultaneously glorify America and himself, between which he makes little distinction.

Trump has bizarrely exaggerated the pool’s dimensions, falsely calling it “longer than the tallest building in the world” and suggesting its persistent murk was not just an age-old design flaw but a national calamity. Echoing a mantra dating to his original campaign, he claimed that he alone could fix it where his predecessors had failed, transforming its condition from “filthy,” “disgusting,” and “garbage-ridden” into “the most beautiful” “American-flag blue” for up to a century hence. And he said he could do it quickly and cheaply, vowing to complete the renovation in as little as a week for no more than $2 million.

Incompetence: But unlike the last attempt to remedy the pool’s persistent issues, during the Obama administration, Trump’s project did not grapple with the underlying plumbing problems that conspire with the Mid-Atlantic climate to create an ideal habitat for algae. His contractors simply resurfaced the pool’s concrete bottom with foam and a blue-tinted sealant.

Predictably, the algae persisted. Worse, the new surface did not, detaching and floating free in forlorn pieces. Workers dumped hydrogen peroxide into the water in a desperate attempt to beat back the pond scum, while the untimely demise of a few unlucky ducks in and around the pool raised further concerns. The project, meanwhile, took about six times as long as the president promised and cost eight times as much, with further work expected to prolong the effort beyond the Fourth of July.

Corruption: The nation’s approaching 250th birthday was cited as the dubious reason for awarding the work on an emergency basis without competitive bidding, allowing the administration to handpick companies with little or no experience as federal contractors. Some of the business went to an Ohio company called Greenwater Services — a bit of honest advertising given the water’s current hue — owned by James J. Cafaro, a Trump neighbor who has given hundreds of thousands of dollars to committees linked to the president.

This isn’t Cafaro’s first inauspicious encounter with the federal government. In 2001, he pleaded guilty to a conspiracy to bribe Democratic Rep. James Traficant of Ohio. He went on to testify that he gave the congressman, who was pushing Federal Aviation Administration officials to adopt a laser system sold by Cafaro’s company, an envelope stuffed with cash. In 2002, Traficant was convicted of corruption charges and expelled from Congress.

Deception: Lest anyone leap to the conclusion that these unsavory facts suggest the administration didn’t hire the best people for the job, Trump advanced the theory that the real culprit is a conspiracy.

Having begun the project with a fictive account of the pool’s history and false promises of a glorious future, he recently alleged without evidence that the project came up short because unidentified enemies had sabotaged the feature with “a very sharp knife or razors” and algae-promoting “chemicals” in the “dark of night.”

Authoritarianism: The farce took a fascist turn when Trump declared on social media that half a dozen people had been arrested for alleged vandalism of the pool.

One of the targets said he was arrested on an obscenity charge for taunting National Guard troops deployed around the pool. Another said he was taken into custody and detained for hours for touching a piece of federal flotsam. His lawyer, Norm Eisen, argued persuasively that the arrest was an attempt to distract from the mismanagement and corruption surrounding the project, calling it “textbook authoritarian behavior.”

In short, the president’s promise to embody national greatness has been exposed as a shoddy racket wrapped in lies and oppression. The pool reflects after all.