“Trump has screwed up the Reflecting Pool in ways that I never could’ve imagined.”
That’s my quote on NPR’s All Things Considered, which did a great story on the hold that the Reflecting Pool has on our collective interest. They call Trump’s changes to the pool a reality show but it’s more like a horror flick. Seeing the Mad King take a timeless symbol of this country and defile it hurts the soul.
That is why I’ve taken so many pictures of the destruction of the Reflecting Pool. I want to document the damage and reveal the truth about our weak and feckless politicians, Democrats and Republicans alike, who have surrendered so meekly before a dictator.
The illegal destruction of government agencies like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau or USAID are hard to visualize. But the damage to sacred landmarks like the Reflecting Pool is something everyone can see.
The regime hid the demolition of the East Wing of the White House, putting up fences and closing parks so that photographers (like me) couldn’t get photos of our heritage being knocked down and carted away in dump trucks.
But they couldn’t do that with the Reflecting Pool, its very size and centrality defeating attempts to hide their colossal fuckup.
We all saw when the Reflecting Pool turned lime-green in a spectacular algae explosion. And we all witnessed blue sheets of pool liner unfurling like the tattered flag of a fading nation.
MAGA cult members insisted that this was AI, like the AI slop that they pollute the online world with, data centers in the exurbs churning through water and power to produce tributes to Dear Leader.
That’s another reason why I took so many photos. I wanted people to see the undeniable truth. I wasn’t sitting in front of a computer somewhere, I was up at dawn, sitting on the marble steps, camera in hand, documenting what the Reflecting Pool looked like on a near daily basis.
The draining of the pool. The no-bid contractors spraying blue paint and sealant all over the concrete, driving over their hoses, working while the surfaces were still wet, water pooled in the corners.
And then refilling the water, sparkling with nanobubblers and “looking good, sir!” for a couple of weeks, flurries of self-congratulations from Trump and his minions, before the pool turned fluorescent green, like a flavor of Gatorade, NPS staff with long hoses futilely trying to clean up the mess, bottles of chemicals dumped in but you can’t defeat algae, only contain it, then chips of blue sealant floating to the surface, big sheets peeling up, the networks covering it live 24/7, claims of sabotage, arrests and protesters appearing with banners supporting Algaetifa before the administration gave up, fenced off the pool and drained it.
Oh, and there was no 350 foot yard gash in the pool, caused by a vandal, like Trump claimed. I was there to document the truth the morning the pool went dry, my most popular tweet ever with more than two million views.
The fix of the Reflecting Pool was supposed to take a week and cost $2 million. Instead, it’s been months and has ballooned to $16 million and counting.
So similar to another water-based quagmire that Trump stumbled into around the same time: the Gulf of Hormuz. He can’t keep either body of water open, defeated by algae at home and Iran abroad.
Like I said in the NPR story, “The Reflecting Pool was fine.” The pool did what it was supposed to do – reflect water. Maybe it was a little murky at times but at sunrise, with the sun coming up from behind the Capitol, no one noticed. It was a gorgeous Washington vista that seemed timeless and inviolable until Trump violated it.
Now, the Reflecting Pool is empty, just acres of bare concrete under a summer sky, surrounded by a fence, monitored by security cameras on poles and watched by National Guard soldiers.
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