"These pools that still reflect the total sky"

The Reflecting Pool on the National Mall is a marvelous national mirror, that long still rectangle holding the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument and the sky all at once. It’s a difficult structure to maintain, apparently, and it had gotten tired—murky, leaky, due for some help.

So when the administration announced it would restore and refresh it, my first thought was: good. Finally, a project that isn't a fight. Fix the pool. Who could object?

No one needed to. Turned out the project objected to itself.

It began, as these things do now, with the bragging. Trump talked incessantly about the pool, primarily to make it reflect his own self-imagined greatness above all other presidents.

This would be the finest restoration in the history of restorations! It would prove, somehow, that the people who admire the President can do things that the people who don't admire him cannot.

So (of course), the contract for the task of restoring our Reflecting Pool went out without competitive bidding to Trump’s friend and donor. He turned out to be—to put it gently—not a man who knew much about water. And then this particular Big Brag of Trump’s collided with six and a half million gallons of physical reality.

Not poetically green. Algae-soup green, with islands of paint peeling off the new surface and floating like something you'd skim off a neglected aquarium. The mirror of the republic became a swamp you wouldn't let a dog drink from. There is no spin fast enough to cover that much yucky water.

So this weekend brought the part that isn't funny. The failure to fix the pool, we are now told, is the work of vandals. There are arrests. Vandalism is a crime, and if someone genuinely sabotaged public property, prosecute them.

But the rest of us are entitled to ask the obvious question before the narrative hardens into doctrine: What vandal turns six and a half million gallons to algae and peels fresh paint off the bottom? Where is the evidence? Where is the science?

It is a judgment on us as a nation that restoring an inanimate object can result in a partisan fight that threatens the simple truth of the situation and possibly the liberties of citizens. The police have arrested a 67-year-old man for touching a piece of the peeling paint, and now Trump and MAGA are demanding that he and unnamed others pay a price for the algae soup and the floating pieces of commercial-grade, poly-urea-polyurethane hybrid lining.

A failed renovation is an embarrassment. A failed renovation that gets blamed on “enemies,” with ordinary people hauled in to make the story stick, is something else. It's the small, ugly, internal machinery of a man who cannot—ever—be the one who got something wrong.

That's the whole lesson, and it's why a story this trivial is worth five minutes of your time. Take away the National Mall and the marble and the history of the place, and you have a perfect miniature of this president and his administration altogether: the grandiosity, the boundless claims of the greatness beyond all previous greatnesses, then the favor handed to a crony, the indifference to whether what they’re doing actually works, and finally the reflex to find a culprit when it doesn't. And, of course, the lies about it all.

The pool didn't change Trump. It just revealed him, the way a clear pool is supposed to reveal whatever leans over it.

Trump is eighty now, and to my eye he is heavier and slower than the man who first bulled his way into our attention, wheezier, crankier, the old ferocity gone a little soft at the edges. And the public is doing the simplest, most devastating thing a public can do to a powerful man. It's beginning to find him faintly ridiculous.

The mirror still works. That's the problem. He spent much of the week declaring war on his own reflection.

A hundred years ago, Robert Frost found another pool—snowmelt in a New England wood, holding the whole sky, representing nothing, asking nothing of anyone, destined to disappear. The roots will drink it up, and the summer woods will close over the place where it was.

I thought this simple reminder of the truth of water from one of our greatest American poets might refresh.

—Terry

by Robert Frost

These pools that, though in forests, still reflect

The total sky almost without defect,

And like the flowers beside them, chill and shiver,

Will like the flowers beside them soon be gone,

And yet not out by any brook or river,

But up by roots to bring dark foliage on.

The trees that have it in their pent-up buds

To darken nature and be summer woods—

Let them think twice before they use their powers

To blot out and drink up and sweep away

These flowery waters and watery flowers

From snow that melted only yesterday.