This may seem a tempest in a teapot, a relatively incidental matter compared with wars in the Middle East and whatnot, but it’s making lots of news in the past couple days, and the incident seems to represent the broad manner in which Trump is leading the government. Trump emptied the reflecting pool, had the bottom painted blue (apparently in the naive assumption that the water would then look the same blue) by a no-bid contractor who had once resurfaced a pool at one of his properties. What could go wrong?
The Guardian, yesterday: Algae thwart Trump’s $14.2m attempt to turn reflecting pool ‘American flag blue’, subtitled “Green algae have proliferated amid warm weather after Lincoln Memorial pool renovation turning water green”
The New York Times, 15 Jun 2026: Trump Ordered ‘American Flag Blue’ for the Reflecting Pool. It’s Green Again., subtitled “Algal blooms have hit the site, between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument, after a $14.2 million repair project.”
President Trump wanted the Reflecting Pool at the Lincoln Memorial to look pristine. Photosynthesis had other plans.
Days after the Trump administration completed a $14.2 million project to coat the Reflecting Pool’s concrete floor with dark blue waterproofing material, clumps of algae dotted the surface on Sunday and Monday, giving parts of the pool a green hue.
The pool was gleaming last week after the work, which was meant to fix two longstanding problems, leaks and algal blooms, before the country’s 250th birthday. But after several hot and humid days, the algae returned in force.
A spokeswoman for the Interior Department, which manages the site, said the project involved the successful installation of a water-treatment system called a nanobubbler. She said the algae would be gone soon.
Sure. We’ll see.
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As the news organizations temper their take on this story, I appreciate this informed take by “AMV,” the host of one of the groups I follow on Facebook.
Facebook, AMV, today: This has been one of the most succulent ironies I’ve seen in a long time. …
Here’s the entire post, in which I’ll bold a few passages I might otherwise have just quoted. Well, no I won’t for now. Read the whole thing.
This has been one of the most succulent ironies I’ve seen in a long time. The administration that denies climate change has created a scale model of how it happens at their door because of their ignorant decisions and impositive orders.
They have a miniature anthropocene right there.
Disturbed by what he deemed a “filthy” aesthetic, Trump bypassed seasoned engineers and civil specialists, awarding a $14.2 million no-bid contract to a company that had previously coated a swimming pool at one of his private golf clubs.
The mandate was simple, superficial, and unburdened by expertise: paint the bottom of the historic, 2,000-foot-long basin a specific, patriotic hue dubbed “American flag blue”.
What followed is a masterclass in the unintended consequences of weaponized ignorance. By applying a dark, industrial epoxy coating across an expanse larger than six soccer fields, the builders unwittingly created a perfect, enclosed macro-experiment in anthropogenic climate change.
And I want to state the following: executive orders cannot override the basic laws of physics.
When solar radiation hits a body of water, the color of the basin’s floor dictates how that energy is managed:
The light, untreated stone bottom reflected a significant portion of solar energy back out of the shallow water, keeping temperatures relatively stable.
The dark “American flag blue” epoxy acted as a giant solar heat sink. Dark colors absorb a drastically higher percentage of the light spectrum, transferring that energy directly into the stagnant water as heat.
As a heatwave rolled through Washington D.C., the water temperature spiked. In biology, an increase in temperature accelerates metabolic rates. Combined with the untreated, nutrient-rich water pumped from the Tidal Basin, Trump’s dark blue floor transformed the national monument into a high-capacity biological incubator. Within days of completion, the pristine “azure expanse” underwent an ecological shift, blooming into a chartreuse, mossy green soup.
The delicious irony of the chartreuse reflecting pool is that it acts as a literal mirror to the administration’s broader environmental philosophy. On a global scale, the burning of fossil fuels, the promotion of carboelectric plants, and the deliberate dismantling of pollution regulations trap heat within our atmosphere. When scientists warn that a warmer planet alters ecosystems and triggers catastrophic, compounding consequences, the response from this political faction is denial, regulatory rollbacks, and the purging of expert agencies.
Yet, right at their doorstep, the exact same feedback loop played out in miniature. The administration tried to conquer nature with a superficial aesthetic fix, ignored the thermodynamic warnings of pool specialists, and accidentally engineered a swamp.And having workers dumping peroxide into the pool as a temporary solution to the problem reminds me of that Futurama episode in which they dropped giant ice cubes into the ocean to cool it while raising its level.
But the new green color of the pool is just a visual punchline easier to notice than everything else they could have expected.
-AMV
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A couple more items, less emblematic perhaps.
NY Times, Jamelle Bouie, today: The Real Reason Trump Never Stops Talking About Voter Fraud [gift link]
Opening:
Donald Trump knew as well as anyone that he had lost the 2020 presidential election fair and square. He knew there was no conspiracy to commit voter fraud — no mysterious mail ballots, no “illegal” voting, no suspicious activity in key swing states. When he told his supporters that the election had been “rigged,” he was lying.
His monthslong effort to “stop the steal,” culminating in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, was an exercise in deception. And we know it was an exercise in deception because Trump’s aides and allies said so. On the record. Under oath.
“The defendant’s vice president,” reads the indictment in United States v. Donald J. Trump, “told the defendant that he had seen no evidence of outcome-determinative fraud.” His attorney general at the time, Bill Barr, said the same. So did his director of national intelligence, senior White House attorneys and the top staffers and strategists on his campaign.
Everyone told Trump that he had lost. They showed him the numbers. They urged him to relent. The party was over and Joe Biden would be the next president.
…
To say, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, that there was systematic voter fraud is to lie. And Trump, again, was lying. But he was also making a specific political claim. If there were no shenanigans but there was still “fraud” because the election was “rigged,” then it’s clear that the meaning of fraud has less to do with any particular set of rules and procedures than it does with the more elemental aspects of American political life. And it doesn’t take much work to decipher the president’s conception of “fraud.”
Bottom line:
“Voter fraud” is not about fraud. It is about who votes and how. It is about the breadth and scope of the political community. It is, as with most MAGA obsessions, about who can call themselves Americans — entitled to govern as equals — and who are mere subjects. Trump’s obsession with voter fraud is just another expression of the reactionary populist belief that the people who inhabit a place are not equivalent to the people, who are entitled to rule.
Which is the definition of fascism.
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Noted. Will read later.
Washington Post, Bill Drexel, yesterday: Build an angel, not a demigod, subtitled “Religious commitment is good at shaping behavior. That should interest AI labs.”
The headline on the homepage was “Could AI turn evil? Try feeding it religion.” Which is why it caught my attention.
