President Narcissus and the Fetid Reflecting Pool

 

Opinion

Michelle Cottle

President Narcissus and the Fetid Reflecting Pool

 

June 24, 2026

Michelle Cottle

By Michelle Cottle

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/24/opinion/trump-reflecting-pool-washington.html

Ms. Cottle writes about national politics for Opinion.

 

Public service announcement for anyone planning to visit Washington in the immediate term: Steer clear of President Trump’s hot mess of a reflecting pool. Don’t dip a digit in its emerald water. Don’t play with its “American flag blue” strips of peeling paint. Don’t get too close to the federal workers struggling to repair this refurbishment from hell. In fact, maybe skip the landmark altogether, lest you, too, get cuffed and hauled off by the park police for allegedly desecrating the president’s most half-baked vanity project to date.

 

Bungling the $14 million-plus redo of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, concocting batty stories about what really happened — Knife-wielding vandals? Corrosive chemicals “illegally” dumped in the water? — and harassing innocent bystanders to distract from his own incompetence: These are not the most outrageous things the president has done since his return to office. But that is part of what makes this saga so irresistible and resonant. It is Trumpism made laughable — farce rather than horror or tragedy.

 

As with the White House ballroom brouhaha, we see the power of vivid images and simple metaphors. Workers vacuuming algae out of the pool, oily green slime, a dead duckling floating in the muck — these visuals can capture the public imagination, even among Americans largely fed up with and tuned out of politics.

 

Trumpian moves such as going to war with Iran and slashing Medicaid upend more lives, but those policy failures take a lot of intellectual and emotional bandwidth to process. And learning about the American military accidentally bombing an elementary school in southern Iran will make plenty of people want to turn away.

 

Some guy wasting a pile of money on a shoddy remodel? Everyone gets how pathetic and hilarious that is. The memes practically generate themselves. My personal favorite is the image of Cousin Eddie from “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation” standing in his shorty bathrobe, draining a chemical toilet into the reflecting pool.

 

With any screw-up, Mr. Trump ducks accountability by blaming nefarious enemies plotting against him. Only people mainlining the MAGA Kool-Aid will buy the idea that terrorist-vandals wielding magic blades (because please recall that Mr. Trump assured us last month that the pool’s fancy new coating was impervious to knives) sneaked past the surveillance cameras and security patrols around the National Mall to carve a 250-foot — Oops, make that 300-foot! No, better still, 350-foot! — gash in said coating. “WOW, who would do such a thing?” he raved in a Sunday social media post. “SICK, DERANGED PEOPLE.”

 

To review: First, the president made up stuff about his new pool being indestructible. Now he’s making up more stuff about the villains who supposedly destroyed it.

 

If the president had even a smidgen of evidence for his claims that the pool had been “seriously vandalized,” his people would be hawking it all over creation. Instead, we’re left with Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, blathering on Fox News about her commitment to prosecute anyone “in a position of vandalizing or attempting to vandalize” the pool.

 

For those in search of genuinely sketchy behavior, note how the administration awarded a piece of the reflecting pool job, specifically its water-purification system, through a no-bid contract to a company tied to John J. Cafaro, a Trump-supporting Mar-a-Lago neighbor. Everyone is claiming ignorance, of course. No matter, the results are what we’ve come to expect: The president’s allies get rich while the public gets shafted.

 

Clever Democrats will not waste this opening. This election cycle, the blue team’s candidates have tried to weave examples of government waste, dysfunction and economic failure into a larger Trump-era corruption story. The president overseeing the creation of a costly, green, swampy mess in the middle of the National Mall is … mwah! … chef’s kiss.

 

Finally — and I cannot stress this element enough — this whole sorry episode is blessedly clownish. I don’t mean clownish like that bloody spectacle of a cage match birthday party Mr. Trump threw himself on the White House lawn this month. I count that among the legion of things this president celebrates that appall his critics but appeal to key chunks of his base.

 

Mr. Trump’s reflecting pool face plant, by contrast, is more Three-Stooges-meet-Bozo-the-Clown-ish. Getting bested by an algae bloom then throwing a finger-pointing tantrum about it doesn’t make Mr. Trump seem scary or threatening so much as petulant and inept. People are laughing at him, and that laughter undermines his image as a take-charge master of the universe.

 

This is the true gift of the reflecting pool meltdown. Mr. Trump looks foolish, with relatively minimal damage done to the nation. The economy will not crater. The global order will not be upended. No one will be deported to a foreign gulag. No one is likely to die. Aside from, perhaps, some poor little ducklings.

 

That said, I still recommend that summer tourists forgo pool gawking for the duration. Maybe check out the National Zoo instead. The pandas will be more welcoming.