A Reflecting Pool That Finally Reflects

Trump's sixteen-million-dollar Reflecting Pool makeover has surrendered its Union blue, and the symbolism is doing all the work for us.

(Source: The Washington Post)

The Washington Post is reporting today that the bottom of the Reflecting Pool on the National Mall has turned from blue to gray. You may recall that the president ordered the pool’s basin repainted “American flag blue” earlier this summer as part of a renovation whose price tag swelled from an initial estimate of under two million dollars to more than sixteen million.

The results did not survive the month. First came the algae blooms that left the water looking, in the words of one visitor, like vomit. Then the new coating began peeling from the floor, which the president blamed, without evidence, on vandals wielding knives.

Now the pool has been drained entirely, and aerial photographs reveal what taxpayers actually purchased.

The gleaming patriotic blue has faded to a dull, mottled gray.

Historians are not supposed to traffic in omens, but it is difficult to resist this one. There is something entirely appropriate about blue giving way to gray at the feet of Abraham Lincoln, under the watch of a president who routinely praises Confederate generals, who restored their names to army bases, and who has spent his second term recasting the story of the war they fought to destroy the Union.

The Reflecting Pool has always invited us to see ourselves in its surface. For the moment, at least, it reflects the administration above it with uncomfortable precision.

The Union blue is gone.

What remains is Confederate gray, peeling, contested, and vastly more expensive than anyone was told.

Have a great day, folks.