'Make Reflecting Pool Great Again" Narcissus Might Agree

Given the five-month war with Iran, the ICE invasions of U.S. cities, efforts by the Trump administration to fix the 2026 congressional elections, the skyrocketing of the prices of basic consumer goods, and the perpetual grifting of the Trump family—the Lincoln Memorial Pool Brouhaha should be one of our least concerns. As argued below, such is not the case. Let me explain.

 In an effort to beautify Washington, D.C. according to the aesthetic tastes of Donald Trump, our beloved president decided to have The Lincoln Reflecting Pool floor painted “American flag blue.” The refurbishing of the pool was part of an architectural redesign meant to symbolize the president’s vision of turning the U.S. into a new “golden age,” in which, as Trump envisions it, the nation would become “hot” again.

Based on the president’s prompting, in the desire to complete the project in time for the 4^th of July 250^th anniversary celebration, the selected no-bid contractor turned this into a rush job. The result was the growth of algae blossoms in the pool, which turned the color of the water bright green. Cracks, which led to the peeling of sheets of the lining of the pool also soon appeared. Rather than taking responsibility for the problem, in true Trumpian fashion, through the Department of Justice, the president shifted blame to so called vandals. 

 U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, Jeanine Pirro, charged former Olympian canonist, David Hearn with maliciously causing damage to the pool’s lining even as there was abundant evidence that part of the lining had already come apart before Hearn got to the pool. The tune of vandalism was a refrain echoed by the president and the Secretary of Interior against Hearn, charged with a felony, and several others who were charged with misdemeanors. Once it became clear to “Judge Jeanine” that the accusations against Hearn and the others could not hold, she called for a dismissal of the cases and blamed the Secretary of Interior for holding back evidence that would have exonerated the victims of this hoax from the get-go.

 Rather than accepting Pirro’s assessment, Trump doubled down, contending that the judge chocked under pressure. In continuing to insist—with little credible evidence to back him up—that vandalism did occur; Trump now wants her to reopen the case against Hearn and the other victims of his retribution.

 Trump has a long history of castigating blame on others for his own self-inflicted problems. In this case, the problem is especially pernicious because the President of the United States is utilizing the legal system to lay responsibility on imaginary culprits, which, in Hearn’s case could have resulted in a 10-year prison sentence. That’s on a personal level, which is troubling enough. On a broader level, the accuser who has skirted the law well before entering the presidency, is manipulating the legal system to justify his own vanity project in the futile effort to raise himself to glory. What this shows is the emptiness of his own morality, in which the only thing that matters is that Trump is right, no matter how wrong he may be, and that those who reject his various lies and mischaracterizations become subject to his ridicule, intimidation, and, in this case, his outright persecution.

 This is not only perverse. It is, in the most ethical sense, evil, in which those who seek to excuse or defend his stance over such mendacious claims are participating in the acts he not only perpetuated on the accused. More fundamentally, he is corrupting the political culture by infusing governmental policy with the corrosive stench that goes to the core of his most primary political impulses. In creating the conditions that have allowed this man to assume the office of the President of the United States, “we the people” have become corrupted in some fundamental sense in a manner that would have made the founders of this nation shudder.