Let Us Reflect

As the sun breaks on our 250-year-old republic, the overwhelming energy with which it daily bathes the earth now fills the chlorophyllic bellies of billions of tiny phytoplankton—which is to say, algae—in the iconic Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool on the National Mall. Despite the best efforts and chemical interventions of National Park officials, the unblinking eyes of hundreds of cameras, and the increasingly deluded ravings of our head of state, the best anyone seems able to make of it is a shifting arrangement of blue and green smears; Rothko considers the Seattle Seahawks.

The Reflecting Pool has long served as a shimmering, dark mirror for our national myths. It fills the background in images of Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Jenny and Forrest reunited there in Forrest Gump. Its waters are placid. Just shy of totally still and just short of black when seen from above. It fills the space between the monuments of Washington and Lincoln like a void, inviting us all to see ourselves stretched between the founding of our republic and its salvation—a masterfully simple use of space that compels sober contemplation.

On June 14, 2026, Donald Trump took the occasion of his birthday to turn the Lincoln Memorial into a catwalk for the fragile machismo of the American right. Immediately thereafter, he turned the mirror at Lincoln’s feet into a man-made swamp. A touch of the capital’s primordial nature unleashed, perhaps, upon the face of one of the country's most carefully cultivated spaces. 

Anyone who’s kept a pool, or even a fish tank, will be familiar with the delicate chemical dance that keeping a container of standing water entails. Bacterial blooms, fungus, detritus and debris, and yes, algae—all the forces of a dysfunctional ecosystem indelicately cared for. Donald Trump, unsurprisingly, has never tended a goldfish. 

But his failure to successfully “update” the Reflecting Pool is hardly the story. A botched job redecorating the negative space between two more famous monuments would be the C-plot in a midseason episode of a Veep spinoff, at best. The story is, as always, the coverup. Or in this case, the freakout. It’s the soggy ravings of the president on his personal microblogging site, screenshotted and smeared across our timelines. It’s the National Guard who, after a year of meandering uselessly around DC to soothe the president’s need for strongman posturing, has finally found a mission: standing watch around a dirty pond while all the ducks die. It’s Donald Trump’s violent, pawing need, not to win, but to be seen to have won. To see himself as a winner or, when observable reality disagrees, to declare war on reality. It’s the president’s shrieking demand that everyone else join him in waging war upon a mirror.

And like every perversion of his second term, the metaphors are too blunt by half. He didn’t just fall short of his promises to clean up the government. He deepened the corruption of our politics with a seemingly inexhaustible grift engine designed to directly enrich and aggrandize himself. Donald Trump didn’t just fail to drain the swamp—he created a brand new, quite literal, one. He polluted a pool designed to encourage reflection and turned into an opaque morass. Rather than returning to X (née Twitter) where—despite the best efforts of Elon Musk to rectify this—the president might still be confronted with a muddled but far too honest reflection of his standing among the electorate, he clung to his personal Twitter clone site, Truth Social, where he’s forever cocooned inside a chorus of cultish affirmation. Trump pasted his face on our money, hung it on the side of the grandest edifices of our republic, stole our neighbors, killed our friends, perverted our courts, and looted our treasury. At every turn, he has confirmed the adage that everything Donald Trump touches dies. What the truism leaves out is that the most common cause of death is suffocation. Narcissus, unmoved by the painfully mortal, misshapen truth of his own reflection, buries his pond in shit, builds a fence around it, and erects a gilded statue atop the manure.

I don’t know why this is the one. Why the Reflecting Pool—rather than the crater of the East Wing, or the ruin of the South Lawn, or the coward’s shroud hanging from the side of the Kennedy Center, or any of the far more meaningful crimes, calumnies, and schemes of the last decade—is turning into Donald Trump’s Stalingrad. But I’m inclined to believe it’s because this is one metaphor that’s simply too blunt. 

For a year and a half, we have watched an 80-year-old demented, effluvient, affluenza patient stifle our economy, trample our constitution, terrorize our neighbors, insult our sacred traditions, threaten our allies, promise genocide, guarantee holocaust, and start (then promptly lose) an illegal war, the consequences of which we will be living with for a generation. They call him the “king of deals,” but he’s bankrupted six casinos. At every turn, we’re reminded why. We’ve watched as a talentless totem of meaningless celebrity gutted scientific research, pardoned traitors, paid off terrorists, tortured families, murdered innocents, and wrapped himself in the flag of freedom while demanding our gratitude for each humiliation. We see the rosy-cheeked marionette, Speaker Mike Johnson, stumble through some absurd denial of any knowledge of the day’s most significant event to avoid the risk of an octogenarian making a mean post about him. The Supreme Court scrapes and bows and invents new dogmas to crown him godking. The media stumbles around, drunk on the fumes of his power and attention, no matter how bitter the glass. Meanwhile, we are treated as if we cannot taste, read, or hear.

Banners of the leader’s face hang low over the doors to Justice, flagging limply in Washington’s humid breath. The mosquitoes are unbothered. US Marshals are arresting people on the National Mall for the crime of noticing that the president’s new paint is peeling off the bottom of the pool, that the symbols of the nation itself are rejecting him. Quietly he worries to his aides that his name will be chiseled off of everything. That he will be an odd scar on the immense back of American history. That nothing beside will remain.

Call it Greenwatergate. In the ruined ripples of the Reflecting Pool, between the lines of his panicked attempts to backfill excuses and deflect blame, in the swirling foam of hydrogen peroxide and algal blooms, perhaps here, through the fog of whatever ails him, he begins too late to confront the true and complete shape of the man in the mirror.

Featured image is Reflecting Pool, by Nathan Congleton