There’s no question that the debacle surrounding President Donald Trump’s rehabbing of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool doesn’t rise to the level of, say, his choice<\/a> to wage war with Iran, his dumb and legally challenged<\/a> imposition of tariffs, or his insistence on socializing businesses<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But it’s equally true that this fetid little episode, not yet fully resolved, provides a shorthand of everything cloudy and foul-smelling about his so-far terrible second term<\/a>, especially his unwillingness to own his failures (such as admitting he lost the 2020 election<\/a>). Jimmy Carter fought killer rabbits<\/a>. Gerald Ford fell down staircases<\/a>. And George H.W. Bush puked on foreign dignitaries<\/a>. Trump is now fighting an algae bloom in such a way that he is becoming a laughingstock.<\/p>\n

“You won’t be seeing this Biden filth and incompetence much longer!,” he declared triumphantly<\/a> last fall on Truth Social when announcing plans for the job. It was supposed to cost just $1.5 million<\/a>. This April, he bragged<\/a> endlessly about his expertise in swimming pools, telling the media, “I’ve probably built more than 100 swimming pools….There’ll be no leaks; there’ll be no anything….It’ll look gorgeous, beautiful.” On June 3<\/a>, he unveiled a bizarre, decidedly Freudian graphic comparing the length of the reflecting pool (2,030 feet) to the heights of the Empire State Building, the Sears Tower, and One World Trade Center. The chart was titled “Our Pool Is Bigger than Skyscrapers.”<\/p>\n

However long the pool is, by the time the repairs were done, the Department of the Interior had signed two no-bid contracts worth over $16 million, or more than 10 times the initial estimate. Yet shortly after the work was completed and the pool refilled, the water was skunkified by an algae bloom, and the waterproofing, done in the president’s handpicked hue of “American Flag Blue,” started peeling up. On June 18, ABC News’ Jonathan Karl reported on both the sickeningly green water and the sad state of the waterproofing.<\/p>\n