In Hot Water
The Pool Reflects Trump’s Woes
Bryan Zepp Jamieson
June 20th, 2026
For some reason, an old golden-age science fiction story has been going through my mind this week as I watch the antics of the rapidly-disintegrating Donald Trump. The 1941 story was called “Bullard Reflects” by Malcolm Jameson. It’s available free to read at the link, and is worth it simply because it has one of the greatest closing lines of all time. Jameson’s story also played a significant role in naval strategic operations going forward.
Now, Bullard’s antagonist was “Egon Ziffler, chief of secret police of the Jovian Empire—the Torturer.” Egon was vicious, vainglorious, with a wildly inflated sense of self-worth and utterly abysmal strategic or tactical skills. So, OK, there’s a lot there to remind me of Trump. But I think it’s because of the use of the word “reflect” in the story that brought it to mind.
It’s a weird situation in pretty much any context, but the fact is that Trump has probably taken more political damage from a vanity project to pretty up a Washington landmark then he has from his catastrophic defeat in his ill-considered foray against Iran. It takes real talent to put a minor refurb project ahead of America’s greatest military and diplomatic defeat in the eyes of the public, but Trump managed.
I’m talking, of course, about the Reflecting Pool. I’ve already had a couple of Trump supporters complain that “liberals never gave the Reflecting Pool a second thought until they saw an opportunity to embarrass Trump.” There’s a certain amount of truth there: most people, including most liberals, just sort of thought of the Pool as one of those pretty sites that was part of DC’s character and that was about it. It was more a matter of good taste and ambiance rather then the sort of deep significance of the Lincoln Memorial or the Vietnam Wall. So no, I never gave it much thought beyond, “Oh, that’s pretty.” I doubt most other people did, either.
Until Trump, as part of his monomaniacal and egotistical drive to reshape DC in his image, declared the Pool a disgrace and blamed its allegedly deplorable condition on Obama and Biden and any other Democrat nearby. As with his other ‘renovations’, he moved unilaterally, without regard to whether he had authority, funding, or if the property was his to reshape. Other presidents, following set procedures, have made similar changes, and nobody ever heard of them. But this is Trump, and the public, already deeply outraged by his destruction of the East Wing and the Kennedy Center, were, at best, deeply skeptical. Experts weighed in, noting that granite couldn’t hold paint well and noting that making the shallow Pool darker under that Washington sun would make the water much warmer.
The rest you know about. The algae exploded, and in an effort to contain it, they dumped in hundreds of gallons of hydrogen peroxide. It killed the algae, but, as Matt Viser at the Atlantic explained, it was replaced by “Scenedesmus, a genus of green algae nicknamed ‘Skinny Dead Mouse’ by scientists.” It’s much harder to kill. Even worse, the lining of the Pool laid out by the contractor, the aptly-named “Greenwater, Inc.” began to disintegrate and bob to the surface. The lining was the same stuff used in truckbeds, and usually works pretty well, assuming it’s given time to cure, isn’t under water, and isn’t exposed to hydrogen peroxide.
So another Trump-created crisis has turned into an utter fiasco. At last word he had stationed National Guard troops around the Pool to prevent souvenir takers from making off with the erstwhile Pool bed while his flying monkeys swamp the social media with screams that Democrats somehow sabotaged the project. This is farce of the purest ray divine.
A court blocked him from closing the Kennedy Center for two years for ‘renovations’–a move on his part to hide the utter fiasco of his renaming the center and alienating all of the world’s higher art community. The running joke was that he only had the option of 900 consecutive nights of some country and western twat yodeling “Proud to be an American” in lieu of all the other performances. He had to hide the utter failure. While the court was at it, they ordered his name removed from the center. He had that done, behind a tarp so the public couldn’t see, a calculated three hours after the court deadline. The tarp is still in place, which is having the opposite effect of what Trump hoped for by paradoxically keeping it in the public eye. There’s already rumors he didn’t really remove his name. Eventually someone will paint “8647” on the tarp and he’ll have to replace it and station more troops to guard it.
Then there was the G7 conference. It was an even bigger fiasco than the Reflecting Pool, and while the stakes are far higher, the nuances were less obvious. Hell, the Pool may have distracted the public enough to spare Trump a greater humiliation.
First, he tried, on camera, to kiss French First Lady Brigitt Macron. He looked for all the world like Uncle Pervy trying to lay a big wet on on an obviously flustered and unwilling twelve-year-old niece. But French President Emmanuel Macron already had the last laugh, arranging for the historically illiterate US leader to sign his agreement with Iran at Versailles, a place that enjoys a certain infamy when it comes to bad treaties and French vengeance.
In another extraordinary diplomatic gaffe, he claimed that Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, the closest thing to an ideological ally he had in the G7, ‘begged’ him to have her picture taken with him. Understandably infuriated, Meloni called the Trump claim ‘fabricated’ and wrote, “As for my popularity, being your friend has certainly not helped it, nor does it depend on my relationship with you. My popularity depends on my ability to defend Italy’s national interest, and that is exactly what I have always done.” Trump, ever the fool, reiterated that she begged him, ‘over and over.’ The US just lost one of its few remaining friends.
Did I mention Trump called Netanyahu a ‘motherfucker’? Yup. One of the few things he got right this week, but not particularly helpful.
Another image caught a seemingly oblivious Trump standing in the midst of other world leaders who were affably greeting and meeting, as isolated and spurned as the proverbial turd in the swimming pool.
And back to the Pool: It just came out that Olympian David Hearn was just arrested. He stopped by the Pool to see for himself, and apparently reached in and felt a chuck of the lining fragment. He then released it, stood up, and walked back to his bicycle. Park Police promptly arrested him for “destruction of government property”! You can’t make this up!
Trump apparently never heard the Charlie Chaplin quote, “The tyrant fears the laugh more than the assassin’s bullet.” But he does have some dim, rat-like awareness that looking like a fool is very dangerous for him. And in increasingly frantic efforts to counteract that, he acts like a greater fool with every passing day. And the laughter grows.
