Pool fiasco is a reflection on the incompetent Trump administration

If you had set out to invent a parable about the American moment, you could scarcely do better than the one unfolding at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. It has everything: a $14 million no-bid contract, a patriotic paint job that began sloughing off within days, an algae bloom of historic proportions, a cure that made the disease look like the remedy, and now a federal dragnet for vandals who, by all available evidence, exist chiefly in the presidential imagination.

Sixteen days after the government finished refilling the pool from a renovation the president himself said would last a century, the water turned a vivid green. The Interior Department announced it would treat the bloom with hydrogen peroxide and something it called “high-tech nanobubble ozone technology.” Almost immediately, great sheets of “American Flag Blue” lining began peeling from the bottom and drifting to the surface like discarded candy wrappers.

If the Reflecting Pool had been the administration’s only calamity, the country might have treated it as a costly farce and moved on. But the pool is not the exception. It is merely the one you can see from the steps where Martin Luther King Jr. once told the nation about his dream. Out of sight, the machinery of government has been grinding out failures of a far graver order, and the pool—absurd as it is—has served a purpose. It has given the public something to gawk at while the larger wreckage piles up unexamined.

Consider the war against Iran. The administration entered hostilities with a characteristically loud list of objectives: degrade the Islamic Republic’s nuclear capabilities, cripple its proxy networks, restore deterrence in the Strait of Hormuz, and bring Tehran to the negotiating table from a position of strength. None of it happened. The campaign sputtered through strikes that did not degrade so much as rearrange, sanctions that leaked at the seams, and a ground posture that ate American lives and matériel without achieving a single irreversible gain. This month, the president terminated operations under terms that even the Pentagon’s own briefers struggle to describe as anything but capitulation. Tehran gave up nothing of consequence. The nuclear program remains intact, the proxies remain armed, and the mullahs were allowed to declare victory while the White House announced peace with the same vocabulary it once reserved for surrender. The “maximum pressure” that was supposed to bring Iran to heel produced a maximum climb-down, and then the administration simply stopped talking about it.

The only real dividend of the entire misadventure was that it has helped smother another scandal that would otherwise be burning in broad daylight. More than a year ago, Congress passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act with considerable fanfare and a lopsided vote. The law required the Department of Justice to release unredacted documents related to Jeffrey Epstein’s trafficking operation—records that might finally identify the rich and powerful men who raped and exploited the girls and young women Epstein delivered to them. Epstein, as the president never tires of reminding people, was once a close friend, and his circle reached deep into the worlds of finance, politics, and entertainment. The deadline for compliance came and went. The DOJ, under this administration, has simply refused. There have been no consequences, no dramatic hearings, no front-page accountability—because the national attention span is presently occupied by peeled paint, hydrogen peroxide, and a phantom with a knife.

One pool expert, watching the footage, concluded that the surface had likely been improperly prepared or that groundwater had crept underneath. It was, in other words, an engineering failure.

That was not the explanation offered from the White House. The president declared on Saturday night that “disgraceful Vandalism” was to blame. Saboteurs, he said, had poured corrosive chemicals into the pool and, more remarkably, “took some form of knife or blade, and put a 250 foot long gash into the beautiful facade.” He promised another round of repairs “immediately” and law enforcement swung into motion.

By Sunday, the Mall had become a peculiar kind of theater. Park Police, U.S. Marshals, and sheriff’s deputies from an assortment of states patrolled the Reflecting Pool on foot and horseback, watching the citizenry with the vigilance you might reserve for an invading army. Officers reminded visitors not to touch the water. A National Guard presence rounded out the scene. The Post could not verify the existence of any 250-foot gash, and at least eight officers, when asked, could not point one out.

Nevertheless, arrests were made. Five people were taken into custody on vandalism charges by Saturday night, with five more receiving federal citations, and the tally continued to tick upward. One of those charged was David Hearn, a former Olympic canoeist. His offense, he said, was reaching into the water to feel a piece of the new liner that was already detached. “I didn’t vandalize anything,” Hearn said. “By the time I realized what was going on, I was being put in handcuffs.” Another woman told officers she had simply plucked a piece of floating paint from the pool, assuming it was litter. A young man was told he would not go to jail because he “seemed cooperative” after allegedly pulling something off the water. A Post reporter watched as a U.S. Marshal detained a woman for the act of removing debris, accusing her of vandalism on the spot.

What we are left with, then, is a government that treated an algae bloom with a chemical that caused the brand-new pool liner to peel, watched the paint come apart in sheets, and then dispatched federal law enforcement to collar the tourists and retirees who touched the scraps. The real vandal, it seems, was the remediation itself, but you cannot handcuff hydrogen peroxide, and you cannot charge a no-bid contract with destruction of public property.

An aquatic ecologist later identified the algae as a harmless native genus, Desmodesmus, a bloom made worse by summer heat and still water. No foreign chemicals were found. No knife marks were documented. The supposed saboteurs remain as elusive as the president’s hundred-year guarantee.

There is a kind of genius in the whole affair, if you care to see it. A pool that was supposed to reflect the Washington Monument and the sky instead reflected the present style of government: take an enormous sum of money, hand it to a favored contractor without competitive bidding, produce a product that fails almost immediately, and when it fails, announce that you have been attacked. Then send men with badges to round up citizens who looked too long at the evidence. It is a closed loop. The failure requires an enemy, and the enemy justifies the response.

Sara Bronin, a law professor who specializes in historic preservation, put the legal posture plainly. The government would have to prove someone willfully damaged the property. But even the broader idea that people cannot engage with the pool, she said, is “a bizarre notion and distortion of what the National Mall represents.” The Mall is there to be felt and experienced. Now it is there to be policed.

Small absurdities sprouted in the heat. A group calling itself “Team Algae,” including one member dressed as a purple frog, rallied in front of Lincoln to cheer the green film as a symbol of resistance. Tourists took photographs not of the monument but of the peeling paint. “It’s a bit of an attraction,” said a visitor from Ohio. A retired couple who walked down from their Northwest Washington home called the whole renovation “basically a vanity project.” The husband, Jon Wiseman, and his wife, Shelly, 75, looked out at the officers, the horses, the drained basin awaiting its third makeover. “It feels seriously out of control,” Shelly Wiseman said. “I feel really powerless.”

And yet the official machinery grinds on. The U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, Jeanine Pirro, warned on Fox News that anyone vandalizing the pool would face “the full extent” of the law and that “more serious charges” could follow if “more serious products” were introduced. One struggles to imagine what a more serious product would be. The government itself already introduced the one chemical treatment that appears to have done the damage, but nobody has been indicted for that. The president took an aerial lap over the scene in Marine One, inspecting the damage from above, and pronounced work would begin immediately.

The pool is now drained again, and the hunt for the knifeman who carved a phantom gash and the chemical terrorists who deployed only what the Interior Department itself poured into the water continues with the solemnity of a ritual. It is an American fable, patiently told without any awareness that it is telling one. The great Reflecting Pool, meant to mirror the Republic’s ideals, ended up mirroring something else altogether: a very expensive, very public, and very earnest search for culprits who do not exist, while the real damage lies right on the bottom, peeling away in indigo sheets, caused not by enemies but by the hands that claimed to be fixing it.