Trump’s Reflecting Pool debacle mirrors what’s ailing America

WASHINGTON — I arrived in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday and headed straight to the Reflecting Pool on the National Mall to see for myself what it looked like.

At first glance, it appeared as if sand had been tossed into the newly renovated water basin located between the Lincoln Memorial and Washington Monument. But my eyes were mistaken. “The sand” was actually the underlying surface showing through as the coating at the bottom started peeling off.

As I bent down to get a closer look, I made a point to keep my hands close to my body. I knew better than to touch so much as a drop of that water since people have allegedly been arrested for vandalism after touching the floating detritus.

President Donald Trump blames “radical lunatics” for defacing his latest renovation project. “This isn’t random mischief — it’s targeted sabotage by anti-American crackpots who despise a strong, proud, and beautiful country. They cannot build; they can only destroy. They cannot celebrate our heritage; they can only deface it," reads a statement released by the White House.

I walked around the pool’s entire perimeter. I didn’t notice any stench, not even a whiff. But the reports are true and Trump’s $14 million no-bid boondoggle to renovate the Reflecting Pool in advance of the nation’s 250th anniversary has faced one stumbling block after another.

Depending on the angle of the sun and where you’re standing, the combination of the newly-added dark paint that’s already chipping away and the algae blooms give the illusion that the pool is a beautiful aquamarine color. I didn’t expect that.

But it’s not what the president ordered.

Nor is it what the American people want or need right now. We want the war with Iran to be over, but Trump is more concerned with putting a Mar-a-lago-esque stamp on the nation’s capital. He has barely acknowledged that Americans are most concerned about is how to pay for gas, food and healthcare insurance premiums.

The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool was fine the way it was. Trump should have followed President Joe Biden’s lead and just left it alone. Same thing with the White House East Wing that Trump ordered torn down for a $600 million ballroom project. Same thing with the Kennedy Center of the Performing Arts before Trump made himself chair and slapped his name the living memorial built to honor the late President John F. Kennedy.

Trump‘s gonna trump though.

Back in April, he announced plans to install an industrial grade surface on the Reflecting Pool. He originally wanted it to be turquoise, but took the contractor’s advice and went with a darker color that he calls “American Flag Blue.” In typical Trump fashion, he claimed it would only take a week to rehab and cost about $1.5 million only for the project to take months to complete and the cost to balloon to $14 million.

Workers refilled the pool June 9. The water quickly turned green, which the Interior Department blamed on “residual algae from the supply lines.” It has since been treated with hydrogen peroxide and ozone nanobubbles. And the blue material coating the bottom has started coming off.

The century-old Reflecting Pool has had issues for years. But it’s still a beautiful thing to behold.

Civil Rights activists famously flanked it while listening to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. deliver his famous, “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963. Same thing when Marian Anderson performed on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1939, after the Daughters of the American Revolution refused to let the African American contralto sing in their concert hall because her race.

Under Trump, the Reflecting Pool has become a Rorschach test of where we are right now as a nation. Some only see its beauty while for others the bumbling rehab symbolizes yet another Trump failure.

“I came to see for myself. I wanted to see what all the hoopla was about,” said Cedric Jackson, an Atlanta resident who I spotted taking photos. “It’s not as green as I thought it was going to be be. So they’ve obviously been doing some kind of work.”

But then he added, “I think this is probably something that could have been avoided.”

I couldn’t agree more. Like so much damage and harm the Trump administration has inflicted during this second term, it didn’t have to be this way.