Reflecting on the Trump Era

An Iconic Transformation

It was dark and cold when I first spotted him, sitting serenely, bathed in soft light. The statue of Abraham Lincoln at his memorial in Washington, D.C., sits 19 feet tall and weighs 120 tons — a white marble monument dedicated to one of the nation’s most intelligent, eloquent, and moral presidents.

I hadn’t come to gaze upon Lincoln but at the reflecting pool that bears his name. It’s been transformed into a different kind of landmark by the inane, inarticulate, and completely immoral man who now holds that same office Lincoln did.

President Donald Trump wants to remake the landscape of Washington D.C., tearing down the East Wing of the White House to build a monstrosity of a ballroom; adding his name to the Kennedy Center or demolishing it if he can’t; and installing a 250-foot-tall “Triumphal Arch” that will “house … large numbers of drones, plus snipers, on both the roof and plaza areas.” This past weekend, the administration even defied a judge’s order and ripped up 430 mature trees at East Potomac Golf Links, a municipal course in southeastern Washington that Trump wants to refashion into a championship-level course, like those of his personal properties.

Trump’s rehabilitation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool — planned to be complete for the nation’s 250th birthday on July 4 — should have been the easiest lift of his planned remodel of the nation’s capital. But it quickly became a monument to failure.

Back in April, Trump said adding a bargain-priced “industrial-grade swimming pool topping” in “American flag blue” to the reflecting pool would leave it looking “gorgeous, beautiful” and would “last for 40 or 50 years.” Instead, the renovation — awarded via a no-bid contract and announced as America 250 festivities on the National Mall approached — started to fail within days. This was followed by a bright green algae bloom and finally a catastrophic lining failure that saw Trump’s chosen coating blister, peel, and then separate from the concrete.

When I visited, the only water in the iconic national landmark — which Martin Luther King Jr. overlooked as he made his historic 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech — was a stagnant puddle that stretched out toward a mass of rotting leaves, a motley collection of plastic beverage bottles, a silver-and-blue aluminum can of RAIN spring water, and a pair of heavy-duty spray bottles often used for commercial cleaning chemicals.

Nested Failures

What I witnessed was emblematic of a White House far out of its depth and completely overwhelmed by disasters — large and small — of its own making. From Washington, D.C., to the Middle East, the Trump administration has been humiliated. It’s a disaster wrapped in fiascos inside a swirling catastrophe, to riff off Winston Churchill’s famed line. These nested failures are legion. The attack on the elementary school in Minab — which killed more than 150 people, most of them children — within the larger failure of the Iran war. The extrajudicial executions of defenseless, shipwrecked survivors within the murderous boat strike campaign. The killings of unarmed people by federal immigration agents and deaths in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody during the larger administration project of anti-immigrant cruelty.

The brutal deportation operations have spawned endless wrongdoing: military occupations of American cities; the arrest and detention of American citizens, the heartless expulsions to third countries; the shootings and beatings of protesters and immigrants, the targeting of Kilmar Abrego Garcia; the swirl of corruption allegations around then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem; and on and on.

Then there is the debasing of democracy and the undercutting of the rule of law through politicization and weaponization of the Justice Department; turning federal law enforcement into a presidential goon squad; gutting of civil rights protections; targeting of political opponents; relentless attacks on the independent judiciary; executive overreach; and the pardoning or commuting of the prison sentences of insurrectionists.

Other scandals and revelations of wrongdoing have been legion: the failure to release the full Epstein files; the settling of Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS; the floating of the “anti-weaponization” fund; the cover-up of the U.S. death toll of the Iran war; Signal-gate; the $400 million Qatari jumbo jet that turned into a security liability; crypto-grifting; quid pro quo tariff reductions; brazen self-dealing; and reckless actions of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, which could result in more than 14 million preventable deaths globally by 2030 — including approximately 4.5 million deaths of children under 5 — all to save Americans about 17 cents per day.

A Presidential Crime Scene

The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool — dry and barren behind a bevy of barricades — looked to me like an open-air prison. At its head, the west end by the Lincoln Memorial, several black metal crowd-control fences and a similar lone orange metal barrier guarded two layers of chain-link fencing. The rest of the perimeter was hidden behind a single layer of metal fencing supplied by National Rent-A-Fence.

Some of the fencing — which stretched a little less than a mile — was covered in a dark mesh screen that hid the waterless pool. In other areas, the fabric had fallen or was torn down and lay in unsightly heaps. Closer to the east end, one small section of fence lay on the ground — a crumpled mess of metal mesh, poles akimbo, looking like a victim at a crime scene — behind a wall of yellow tape: 27 crisscrossed strands reading “POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS.” Beyond that, where the water should have been reflecting the rays of the rising sun, pickup trucks rolled through and workers slowly paced, nodded their heads, and stared out on the hardscape, as if waiting for a factory whistle to sound.

In the face of this fiasco, Trump — as always playing the victim and blaming perceived enemies for his shortcomings — has repeatedly claimed knife-wielding vandals slashed the pool’s liner. Several people, including former Olympian David Hearn, were arrested and charged with felonies and misdemeanors, but those cases fell apart. The Interior Department provided documents to the U.S. attorney’s office “indicating that damage to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in June 2026 was the result of flawed installation by the contractor, Atlantic Industrial Coatings.” The Justice Department also called it a “rushed and botched installation” and in July dropped charges that it had brought against people accused of vandalizing the monument. On October 1, a judge said federal prosecutors cannot refile charges against Hearn. But just last week, Trump was still pushing the lies. “We had vandalism there,” he told the press. “Only sick people do that, and we have their pictures.”

Not far from Lincoln’s statue, the administration offered up these same excuses, complete with Trump’s “filthy dirty” language and vandalism falsehoods. A lone laminated sheet of paper affixed to the fencing read:

Last week, Atlantic Industrial Coatings announced on its website that: “All warranty repairs were completed Friday, 10/2/2026!” The company added: “It has been an honor to serve our great nation!” Trump followed by claiming that the reflecting pool re-do was nearly finished. “I think they’re gonna fill it up this week,” he said on October 6. “The Reflecting Pool is totally complete.”

The National Park Service did not respond to numerous detailed questions from The Intercept about the work by Atlantic Industrial Coatings and whether the pipes were completely unclogged and the granite completely clean. Atlantic Industrial Coatings also failed to respond to questions.

On Monday, a new sign appeared on the fencing as water began flowing back into pool. “The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool is being refilled as the National Park Service and contractors put the final touches on a historic effort to clean, repair, and beautify this iconic national landmark,” read a sign without any attribution. It also contained a caveat: “As part of the normal refilling process, the water may temporarily appear cloudy before clearing.”

Whether the Reflecting Pool will again stand as a fitting reflection of “the beauty, dignity, and grandeur of our nation’s capital,” or suffer another catastrophe that leaves it looking like an eyesore, it is symptomatic of the larger issue of unforced errors heaped upon failures which the Trump administration is powerless to fix and can only sometimes, after multiple attempts, contain. It has become a pitiful, helpless giant, unable to achieve even its most modest goals with the power to do little more than spew out misinformation; cloak misdeeds in secrecy; undermine, sabotage, and destroy government institutions; and unleash pain on the most vulnerable and defenseless, like school children in Iran and undocumented immigrants in America.

With Malice Toward All

Trump promised to drain the “swamp” of Washington corruption but instead supercharged it and managed only to drain the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool of water and the country of any shred of decency.

In late August, Trump took to Truth Social to claim he was “six times more popular than Abraham Lincoln” — a reference to a poll of present-day Republicans, of whom 53 percent said the president they most admire is Trump, compared to 8 percent who named Lincoln. That same month, he ranked himself above Lincoln and all other presidents. It’s somehow fitting that Trump wrecked the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in the same way he has soiled the office Lincoln once held.

Trump promised to drain the “swamp” of Washington corruption. He managed only to drain the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool of water and the country of any shred of decency.

Whether Lincoln could have imagined a president as depraved as Trump is unknowable but he did fear, in his own time “something of ill-omen, amongst us … the increasing disregard for law which pervades the country; the growing disposition to substitute the wild and furious passions, in lieu of the sober judgment of Courts.” He couldn’t have anticipated the boat strikes, the term human trafficking victim, or the fact that the U.S. might kill the latter during the former, but in that same 1838 speech — when he was just 28 years old — he understood the perils of such summary executions, noting “when men take it in their heads to day, to hang gamblers, or burn murderers, they should recollect, that, in the confusion usually attending such transactions, they will be as likely to hang or burn someone who is neither a gambler nor a murderer.”

Trump is, however, content to kill without compunction and even recently appeared to invite the nuclear annihilation of Los Angeles and San Diego, although it’s increasingly impossible to divine meaning from Trump’s incoherent ramblings. (He has, though, threatened both cities in the past, deploying troops to LA and threatening to do so in San Diego.) Even Lincoln’s armies — turning to “total war” to end a long, brutal, and costly civil war — did not annihilate the South and decimate its people. And at its close, he sought to “bind up the nation’s wounds” with words Trump would choke on: “With malice toward none; with charity for all.”

Lincoln did not believe that the U.S. could be felled by a foreign power but did foresee the possibility of America sealing its own fate. “If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher,” he said in that 1838 speech. “As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.” The reelection of a craven criminal who sought to subvert what remains of democracy in America certainly appears to be more than a mere cry for help.

“Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid,” Lincoln wrote to his friend Joshua Speed in 1855. Some 171 years later, it may well be complete.

The suffering meted out by Trump has been immense. And his penchant for failure may now be his essential quality. He may ultimately be remembered for turning a reckless military “excursion” into a forever-war failure or as the most debased reprobate to hold the office of the presidency. But Trump’s micro-mismanagement of a local construction project that turned a functioning national monument into a fenced-off blight might be his most illustrative disappointment: a small failure of epic proportions and, in some way, a sorry reflection on all Americans.

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