If you wanted to make an argument that we are all living in some cruel simulation, a key piece of evidence might be that the news keeps providing us with absurd, occasionally quite alarming metaphors for what it’s like to exist in 2026. To wit: The London School of Economics recently canceled an event on extreme heat because of an extreme-heat warning issued by the United Kingdom’s Met Office.
Or, closer to home for Americans: Donald Trump, trying to renovate the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool for America’s 250th birthday and, instead, scoring a tax-payer-funded, $14 million-over-budget own goal in the form of a cracked and peeling, green-algae-riddled, potentially duck-killing militarized zone in the nation’s capital. One of the firms hired for the renovation is named Greenwater Services.
This is the kind of stuff that AI might spit out if you offered a chatbot a lazy prompt for political satire. The shambolic spectacle has captivated the nation, despite the fact that the Obama administration spent $34 million and 18 months renovating the pool with mixed results. The fallout has reached New York Times push-alert status and become grist for the meme and culture-war mills online. Moreover, Poolgate seems to be bothering Trump more than past fiascos, which is notable given that he’s particularly embattled at the moment and staring down a defeat in Iran, low poll numbers, and a poor outlook for the midterms. He can’t stop posting about the ordeal on Truth Social, accusing unnamed saboteurs of vandalism. At the White House’s Great American State Fair on Wednesday night, part of the Freedom 250 celebrations, he ranted about the pool.
Trump’s Reflecting Pool debacle is, by definition, a national embarrassment. But America is no stranger to self-inflicted humiliation these days. (See: Iran and the Strait of Hormuz, Qatar’s gift of a luxury jet to Trump.) Why, then, is Trump crashing out so hard about the Reflecting Pool? Why does it stand out as the enduring metaphor for an incompetent administration that can’t stop providing enduring metaphors of its own incompetence?
Some reasons are obvious. As my colleague Jonathan Chait notes, uncontrolled algae blooms at the Lincoln Memorial are lower stakes and, frankly, much funnier than, say, a war, a self-dealing cryptocurrency scheme, or the destruction of a wing of the White House. (One photo in particular gets me: Four men in camo waders are in the pool. Water, the color of fresh Mountain Dew, laps at their thighs as they dredge the bottom with poles like cranberry farmers on a faraway radioactive planet.) Lately, the saga has taken a more serious turn: The National Park Service alleges that the liner of the pool was cut with a sharp knife or razor earlier this month, causing damage to the pool’s foam sealant. Trump has claimed that at least six people have been arrested and seven people have been cited for damaging the pool, and a spokesperson from the Interior Department reiterated to me today that “there have been seven arrests, seven federal citations and 18 police reports filed.” According to a report yesterday by MS Now, public records show that only David Hearn, a former Olympic canoer, was arrested. (Hearn has said he was touching a floating piece of paint that had peeled off the pool.)
The spectacle has also been straightforwardly ridiculous, such as when Park Service workers were photographed dumping gallon jugs of hydrogen peroxide into the pool one at a time to quell the algae. But Poolgate is something more—a textbook example of how the Trump administration operates. It’s a way that one can explore the anatomy of Trump debacles, which tend to unfold in a (roughly) 13-step process. The Reflecting Pool drama is not all the way through this process yet, but I’d bet good money we’ll get there. It goes as follows:
1. Devise unnecessary spectacle.
The Reflecting Pool—one of the National Mall’s best-known landmarks—is a big, obvious American symbol, and Donald Trump loves big, obvious symbols. Politics and policy are hard. Wars are even harder. But symbols are a layup. Drain that pool, slap some paint on it—be sure to give it a symbolic name: American-flag blue—and boom, you’ve made America great yet again. Extra points if President Obama made a similar move before you and you can claim you’ll do it cheaper, faster, and better. On paper, it looks perfect.
2. Disregard expertise.
According to CNN, in March, the administration reached out to Sika Corporation, the group that provided the concrete and sealing products for the 2010 renovation. The administration stipulated an intense timeline to make the 250th anniversary and that the pool had to be painted blue. Sika said the project was “unfeasible.”
3. Bypass normal procedures.
As The New York Times reported, Trump “handpicked” Atlantic Industrial Coatings for the renovation, giving the company what eventually became a $14.7 million no-bid contract by invoking an exemption “meant for urgent situations.” Trump later alleged he did not know the firm. An Interior Department spokesperson told me, “The contracts and pricing reflects the effort necessary to expedite the timeline of completing the leak prevention coating project—more people, more materials, more equipment and longer hours ahead of our 250th.”
4. Declare victory too early (bonus if done by AI-slop post).
On May 1, Trump posted an image on Truth Social of himself and other Cabinet members shirtless and swimming in the Reflecting Pool.
5. Spend way more than estimated.
“I have a guy who is unbelievable doing swimming pools up the road,” Trump said at the outset of the project. His initial estimate for the price tag was $1.5 million, which he revised the next day to $2 million. He estimated the renovation would last “30, 40, 50 years.” So far the project has cost an estimated $16.4 million.
6. Ignore the haters.
On June 3, as the project was coming in over budget, Trump invited press to the Oval Office to display a piece of poster board that extolled the pool’s size. The caption read, Our Pool is Bigger than Skyscrapers.
7. Realize it is not going well.
Algae bloom. Send in the hydrogen-peroxide brigade.
8. Bypass normal procedures once again.
As The New York Times’ David Fahrenthold reported, “The National Park Service bypassed the competitive-bidding process that is typically required” and instead gave a no-bid contract to Greenwater Services to install a filtration system to help with the algae. During construction Trump instructed the presidential motorcade to drive through the drained pool, shortly after the coating was applied, which has raised questions about whether the drive might have damaged the pool.
Taylor Rogers, a White House spokesperson, told me over email that the Greenwater contract, “was awarded by the Department of Interior” and that “the White House did not play any role in the selection process.” He called the notion that the motorcade affected the pool “dumb and unfounded.” (In all my dealings with the current administration, never before have its spokespeople been as responsive to or seemingly concerned about my impending article.)
9. Allege conspiracy and sabotage.
On Monday, Trump met with reporters and alleged that vandals put fertilizer in the water of the pool as well as cut the seal: “I can’t help it if somebody goes in with a knife and starts hacking it up.”
10. Redeclare victory.
Trump said on Wednesday that the pool “looks perfect already, but we’re fixing it.” Rogers told me that the pool is now “crystal clear and reflecting perfectly.” The pool is currently cordoned off by fences and protected by the National Guard.
These recurrent steps extend beyond Trump into the broader MAGA coalition. Recently, Jared Holt, a senior researcher at Open Measures, an organization that tracks online extremism, used a generative-AI research tool to spot patterns in posts about the Reflecting Pool by right-wing accounts on a selection of right-wing social-media platforms such as Truth Social. The tool broke down more than 2,500 posts into three buckets:
Phase 1: Triumph and Restoration
Phase 2: Defending the Project
Phase 3: Sabotage and Culture War
“For the MAGA faithful, Trump’s renovation of the Reflecting Pool was supposed to be a shining example of his efforts to restore America from its decaying state,” Holt told me. “When it became clear the renovation had been a disaster, MAGA influencers shifted their talking points to instead portray the situation as being emblematic of their critics’ depravity and derangement.” The pattern, Holt noted, is similar to how the MAGA media system responded to the ICE killings in Minnesota earlier this year, or how it has tried to spin the war in Iran. “The primary function of this media ecosystem is to hype up and pacify Trump’s base. And these days, as public support for the administration craters, it’s doing a lot more of the latter.”
This leaves three steps to come in the future. If patterns hold, we should expect 11. More blaming (one contractor told Politico the repairs to the lining will take weeks), followed by 12. Losing interest. And then, of course, the most important one of all. The foundation upon which every Trump debacle is built. The perpetual-motion device of a petulant president:
13. Pretend it never happened, and move on to the next thing.