Green lagoon: Presidency distils Trump to his essence

Maureen Dowd

A historian once told me that the presidency would distil Donald Trump to his essence. That essence, it turns out, is trillions of microscopic organisms that suck up all the oxygen and endanger life around them. That essence is slimy, stinky and unrelenting, as reflected in the mass of algae that infests the reflecting pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial. The president had pledged an “American flag blue” sheen, but the algae created green streaks that marred the $14 million makeover of the water mirror.

The algae is a perfect metaphor to reflect on our unreflective president and his impulsive and solipsistic style of governing. “It looks like a Rothko,” said Amanda Aldous, a 36-year-old teacher who was gazing at the reflecting pool on Wednesday, leading suburban Seattle middle schoolers on a tour. “I think any biologist could have said this was going to happen.”

This is the hallowed site where Marian Anderson serenaded a throng after getting banished from Constitution Hall for her race, and where Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream” speech to an even bigger crowd around the 2,028-foot pool. National Park Service workers in waders were sucking up the dead algae strewed along the bottom on Wednesday. A cooler of Popsicles helped them withstand the hot, humid weather in which the algae thrives.

On Thursday, the Interior Department was claiming to have beaten back the toxic blooms while doing a drive-by trashing of Barack Obama to please the boss. “The advanced nanobubbler technology very effectively killed the algae that has plagued every Lincoln Reflecting Pool reopening most infamously Obama’s reopening since 1922,” the department posted on social platform X. “The Reflecting Pool water is crystal clear, and our National Park Service team is now vacuuming up the dead algae resting on the bottom of some parts of the Reflecting Pool just like the destroyed Iranian Navy resting on the bottom of the Persian Gulf.”

Reports of Trump victories, with the knotty issues of Iran and the reflecting pool, are premature. Iran is gloating about Trump’s bad deal. Senate Republicans who normally don’t have the temerity to challenge Trump are deriding it. And the hydrogen peroxide that park workers used to kill the algae is peeling off the “American flag blue” paint that Trump just had directed be applied to the bottom of the pool.

To give Trump his due, the capital needed freshening up in many spots, and he’s the first president in a while to restore beautiful statues and fountains that had fallen into disrepair. When she was a young woman working for a bond company in the ’30s, my mother would stop at Meridian Hill Park in Columbia Heights on her way home from work. But the gorgeous Italian Renaissance park she loved later grew parched and shabby. Over the past seven years, there was no water in the cascading fountain the longest such fountain in North America or in the placid pool beneath it. Channelling his triumphant rebuilding of Wollman skating rink in Central Park, Trump cleaned up Meridian Hill Park and turned on the faucets, as he did with Union Station’s statue and majestic fountain.

But for each laudable effort, there’s a litany of loathsome ones, like his plans for the hulking ballroom, the egotistical Arc de Trump, the cheesy Mar-a-Lago patio where Jackie’s Rose Garden used to be and the desecration now halted by a federal judge of The John F. Kennedy Centre for the Performing Arts. This past week, a striped wrap was still covering the center’s facade, where workers had removed Trump’s name.

Even when Trump starts with a glimmer of truth that many iconic spots in D.C. had been allowed to shamefully deteriorate he goes overboard in such a Trumpian way that he often ends up making things worse. He orders up bulldozers in the middle of the night, arrogantly refusing to get input from planning experts or Congress in this most meticulously and symbolically arranged federal city. His habit of rushing in unilaterally, refusing to consult anyone except sycophants, insisting the results are amazing even when we can see that they’re not, also led to the debacle of Elon Musk and DOGE and the humiliation in Iran.