Green water flows from an outflow pipe as crews remove algae in the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in Washington, D.C., June 19, 2026. REUTERS/Aaron Schwartz
New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd says there can be no more fitting metaphor of President Donald Trump’s second term than “trillions of microscopic organisms suck[ing] up all the oxygen and endanger[ing] life around them.”
“A historian once told me that the presidency would distill Donald Trump to his essence,” wrote Dowd. “… That essence is slimy, stinky and unrelenting, as reflected in the mass of algae that infests the Reflecting Pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial.”
The Lincoln Memorial, she said, was the “hallowed site where Marian Anderson serenaded a throng after getting banished from Constitution Hall for her race, and where Martin Luther King Jr. gave his ‘I Have a Dream’ speech to an even bigger crowd around the 2,028-foot pool.”
But now National Park Service workers are sloshing through the green soup in waders, using hoses to suck up dead algae and flush the vibrant green ick into DC sewers.
And while Trump is deep in denial mode over his new $14 million taxpayer-funded green lagoon, the Interior Department is laboring to blame it all — somehow — on Barack Obama to please the boss.
“The advanced nanobubbler technology very effectively killed the algae that has plagued every Lincoln Reflecting Pool reopening — most infamously Obama’s reopening — since 1922,” the Dept. Interior posted on X (with a carefully crafted photo hiding the muck beneath the water’s reflective surface). “The Reflecting Pool water is crystal clear, and our National Park Service team is now vacuuming up the dead algae resting on the bottom of some parts of the Reflecting Pool — just like the destroyed Iranian Navy resting on the bottom of the Persian Gulf.”
“Reports of Trump victories, with the knotty issues of Iran and the Reflecting Pool, are premature,” assures Dowd. “Iran is gloating about Trump’s bad deal. Senate Republicans … are deriding it. And the hydrogen peroxide that park workers used to kill the algae is peeling off the ‘American flag blue’ paint that Trump just had directed be applied to the bottom of the pool.”
Trump may have restored local fountains and statues with debt spending, but for each laudable effort, “there’s a litany of loathsome ones,” said Dowd.
“[L]ike his plans for the hulking ballroom, the egotistical Arc de Trump, the cheesy Mar-a-Lago patio where Jackie’s Rose Garden used to be and the desecration — now halted by a federal judge — of The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts,” she said.
And — as in all things, be they local renovations or massive Middle Eastern wars — Trump has a habit of “rushing in unilaterally, refusing to consult anyone except sycophants, insisting the results are amazing even when we can see that they’re not.”
Plenty of Americans miss the days when the U.S. built grand things, she adds, so there is a certain appeal for a “crazy president [to] squash the bureaucracy and get it done.”
“But as usual with Trump, you eventually have to accept that he’s incompetent and corrupt and tacky, and just an all-around mess,” said Dowd.