A second, equally lucrative $1.7 million contract to install a new water treatment system ironically went to Greenwater Services. You don’t have to go far for a connection here either. The firm is owned by the trust of John J. Cafar, a longtime Trump backer and neighbor from Palm Beach, Fla., who has a residence near Mar-a-Lago. His defense of the absence of a tender? “There is no one else in the world who does what we do,” Cafaro told the media.
The smell of a green swamp
However, the water in the shallow, more than six hundred meter long pool turned into an ecological disaster in the hot summer sun within a few days. This phenomenon is well known to water maintenance professionals as the “new pond syndrome.” A massive bloom of Scenedesmus green algae has turned the “American flag blue” green. In addition to the unplanned color, there was also an extremely pungent smell of stagnant water.
To make matters worse, the blue polyurethane coating began to peel off the bottom in large quantities and pieces of dark rubber paint began to float to the surface. While authorities and national parks staff tried to save the situation by desperately pouring hydrogen peroxide, a photo of a dead duckling floating limply among clumps of algae and peeling blue paint surfaced online. According to information, other bodies of dead ducks also appeared in the water.
As Sidney Blumenthal, a former adviser to Bill and Hillary Clinton, put it: “Trump wanted a monument to himself in Washington, and he finally has it. It’s this reflecting pool—the perfect metaphor for kleptocracy, incompetence, and utter chaos.”
Fertilizer phantoms
As the situation became increasingly unsustainable and tourists’ camera lenses mounted, the administration launched a tried-and-true crisis management strategy: looking for the culprit outside. President Trump inspected the work from the air from the deck of his helicopter while returning from the presidential residence Camp David and immediately declared that the pool was facing a massive attack by vandals.
“It’s not my fault when someone walks in there with a knife and starts cutting it up,” the president angrily declared in the Oval Office. According to his claims, which according to experts and journalists are contradicted by the facts, the “sick and disturbed” radicals not only poured unspecified corrosive chemicals and industrial fertilizer into the water, which, according to him, should have directly caused the rapid growth of algae (ignoring the fact that standing heated water acts as a fertilizer in itself), but they allegedly cut a huge, more than 90-meter-long crack at the bottom of the pool with a box knife.
They didn’t find the crack
To support this conspiracy theory, the White House brought up an incident the previous week when someone carved the numbers “86 47” into the grass on the nearby National Mall. The number 86 normally symbolizes the goal of getting rid of, firing or removing someone or something, while 47 refers to the 47th President of the USA, who is Donald Trump.
“Just as they destroyed the grass outside by the pool three days ago, they did everything possible to damage the indoor surface that had just been installed,” he wrote on his social network.
Journalists from The Washington Post, who repeatedly visited the destroyed pool in person, did not find even a trace of a 90-meter crack. All they saw were National Parks staff desperately vacuuming up the thick green water with algae vacuums.
Criminal on a bicycle
When the president publicly threatened ten years in prison on his social network Truth Social for vandals who dare to damage this national monument, the police immediately took action. As a result of the action, ten persons were detained and fined. However, in addition to ordinary people, the agents also detained a person who did not quite fit into the desired image of a radical left-wing vandal, as Trump spoke about.
David “Davey” Hearn, the 67-year-old three-time Olympian and two-time world champion in water slalom, went on his usual 100-kilometer bike ride on the fateful Friday afternoon. As a professional designer of boats and boating equipment, he was purely professionally curious as to what miraculous material the government had used for the coating.
When he got off his bike at the monument, he took off his cycling glove and briefly touched a piece of rubbery blue matter that was already floating in the water, separated from the bottom. A moment later, he found himself in the handcuffs of the armed units of the National Guard. He subsequently spent five hours in a cell without an opportunity to call a lawyer, facing charges of the federal crime of destruction of state property.
“I’m just a curious citizen,” Hearn told the media after his release. “I didn’t destroy, tear, or peel anything. The condition of the pool was not changed in any way, absolutely nothing, by my touch.”
In addition, the photographers of the Reuters agency later managed to capture photos in which a guard agent also walks with impunity around the pool with a piece of peeling paint in his hand.
A fence will also be added
Finally, the White House and the authorities responded to the whole embarrassment and growing public interest in the simplest way – they fenced off the monument. While the Interior Ministry says the wire fence should have been installed anyway ahead of the Fourth of July celebrations due to fireworks, it was put up earlier due to an “increase in vandalism by left-wing activists”.
The surroundings of the pool are now guarded not only by members of the Park Police, but also by units of the National Guard and US Marshals, while, according to some media, security cameras with artificial intelligence have been added above it.
In the meantime, the President declared on social networks that someone had to work very hard and probably under the cover of night to damage the floor. He punctuated his words with a new theory that the pool is likely being targeted by paid “pro-algae” protesters, and even posted a photo of a protester wearing an inflatable frog costume. So far, however, he has not provided a single piece of relevant evidence that the paint, algae or alleged cracks were the result of coordinated vandalism and not shoddy work.
Theater of colossal failure
The controversy over the smelly pool comes just as the Trump administration is frantically trying to remake the capital in its own image. Controversial plans to demolish the historic East Wing of the White House for the construction of a gigantic ballroom with an anti-drone shield for hundreds of millions of dollars, or a proposal to build a 76-meter “Arc of Independence” that will deliberately exceed the famous Arc de Triomphe in Paris, give rise to the feeling that ordinary residents of Washington are living under the occupation of a megalomaniac architect.
For now, the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool remains an unwelcome message of the Donald Trump era. As tour guide José Lebron noted, standing right on the banks of the smelly green reservoir, “Now people don’t come here at all to enjoy a quiet space for personal reflection. They come here to admire the spectacle of one colossal failure.”
