Miasma on the Mall

By Jonah Goldberg

Wednesday, June 24, 2026

 

Every time I get asked by a TV anchor what I think about the drama of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, my favorite “historical” headline from The Onion comes to mind: “World’s Largest Metaphor Hits Iceberg.”

 

And every time I do, I hear from defenders of the Trump administration complaining about the disproportionate media coverage of what should be a very minor story in the grand sweep of things. They have a point. President Trump has done some good work rehabbing Washington, D.C., where I live. But the reflecting pool has bedeviled him. Algae keep returning to the pool, despite the administration’s best efforts, and attempts to remedy the problem have yielded further problems. 

 

I can think of scores of stories that deserve more attention on the merits.

 

But there are two problems with this complaint. First, it was Trump who invited extensive scrutiny of the effort. “I’m very proud of it,” he said before the algae counteroffensive. “I’m very good at building things and constructing things, so I hope you go take a look at it.”   

 

Second, there’s the metaphor-on-the-Mall problem. The reflecting pool is a microcosm of nearly everything that vexes people about the second Trump term. We can start with the decision to ignore the usual rules and procedures to give a no-bid job to a contractor for the repair and paintwork. Trump said it would cost $1.8 million. The costs have grown nearly tenfold. To deal with the insurrectionist algae, he gave another no-bid job to a Mar-a-Lago crony, campaign donor, and convicted felon who looks like a villain from the old Dick Tracy comic strip.

 

The man who vowed to “drain the swamp” of D.C.’s corrupt cronyism used figurative swampy means to deliver literal swampy ends.

 

Another familiar aspect of the pool fiasco: A project Trump touted as proof of his genius and expertise becomes proof of unpatriotic enemies undermining him when it flounders. Without any evidence, Trump claimed that the only reason the reflecting pool’s paint is peeling and algae blooming is because anti-American “vandals” sabotaged it with a “300-foot long gash.”

 

How vandals evaded National Park Police, security cameras, and his own National Guard deployment remains unknown. Never mind how they put a 300-foot gash in a paint job Trump described as, “So very strong. You couldn't, if you had a knife—I don't want to give anybody ideas—if you had a knife, you can't even cut it. So strong, so powerful."

 

But the metaphorical meaning of the miasma on the Mall hardly ends there.

 

During a May 27 Cabinet meeting, Trump boasted at length about the reflecting pool job and then handed the meeting off to his secretary of defense. “I think, actually, your efforts on the reflecting pool are actually a great segue,” Pete Hegseth said.

 

“If you look at Washington and Lincoln, these are two men that faced monumental tasks and stood up in historic fashion and delivered for the American people,” Hegseth gushed. “And, when you step back and look at 47 years of what Iran waged … there’s only one man, over the course of both presidencies, who has stood up and said they will never get a nuclear weapon.”

 

As with so much Hegseth says, this is not exactly true. Every president since Bill Clinton has said that a nuclear Iran was unacceptable. It’s true that Trump is the only president to use massive military force in the name of preventing it. Whether his efforts have made the “never” claim a reality is, at best, an open question.

 

What isn’t an open question: Trump’s unilateral Iranian adventure did not go as planned. What began as another example of Trump trying to will into existence the reality he wanted, segued into a murky, embarrassing, and costly spectacle with no satisfying end in sight. Talk about metaphors.

 

That’s because, as the saying goes, the enemy gets a vote. Trump can bypass or ignore many laws, but not the law of unintended consequences. The defining feature of Trump’s presidency is his unvanquishable belief that laws, rules, and norms are impediments to his will and genius.

 

He expects, nay demands, Hegseth-like sycophancy and praise recognizing that alleged genius.  And when events conspire against Trump, the fault must lie in subversive vandals and lies from “fake news.”

 

The international order, like the domestic order, is not natural. They are more like a man-made garden constructed out of the wilderness of the human condition. When the garden is not maintained, when the rules go ignored, the jungle grows back. Just like the algae.