What is one to make of the president’s growing concern with the Reflecting Pool?
On the surface, it’s stupid. Realizing that the pool was overgrown with algae and not as reflective as it should be, President Donald Trump launched an expensive beautification effort — painting the bottom and trying chemical treatments to treat the algae. The end result: a new algal bloom can result with a new paint color.
Go deeper, and it’s scary. Trump ignored standard federal contracting procedures to award a no-bid contract for the Reflecting Pool beautification to a personal friend who previously pleaded guilty to conspiring to bribe a politician. When it went wrong, the president started persuasive accusations without evidence about the saboteurs destroying his powerful and magnificent restoration. Now Trump says six people have been arrested on suspicion of vandalism, including the former American Olympian, David Hearn, who he claims he only touched the material in the pond. Trump threatens alleged spoilers 10 years in prison.
Go deeper, and it’s a metaphor for any number of different dysfunctions in the current White House, from ignoring experts to failure of scapegoating.
But if we get down under the blue flag of the United States his, the saga of the Reflecting Pool reflects the most fundamental force of the second Trump administration: He is a tyrant at heart – and also very bad at tyranny.
Time and time again, Trump has proven inattentive, distracted, and self-sabotaging — and the culprit, as it stands now, is frequently a minor symbolic issue that emerges in a larger proxy battle over his ego. If American democracy proves resilient in its second term, these time-consuming distractions will be a central part of the story.
Trump’s problems
Donald Trump has always been a man of ambition. What captures and holds the interests of the president are often symbolic issues that have no fundamental importance.
This has been true since the beginning of Trump’s first term. On his first day after his inauguration, he insisted that he had the largest inauguration crowd in history. When the above pictures proved to be false, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer had to use his first meeting. lying on the press’s face – destroy his reputation beyond measure.
But in his second term, Trump’s focus on visibility has turned into a special kind of restructuring suited to his real estate history — a concern to physically transform the White House and Washington, DC, more broadly. They are there several examplesbut here are a few notable ones:
- Trump demolished the East Wing of the White House and has begun building a 90,000-square-foot hall in its place.
- He covered large parts of the Oval Office in gold, even Self supergluing fixtures on his marble fireplace mantel.
- He built a UFC octagon on the White House lawn to host a fight on his birthday.
- He appointed himself chairman of the board of the Kennedy Center and tried to do so the name of the performing arts hall after him.
- He ordered 250 foot bow it will be built across the Potomac River from the Lincoln Memorial.
- He personally guided federal takeover of DC public golf courses.
When past presidents have launched efforts to renovate the White House, they have usually done so for obvious practical reasons: President Harry Truman renovated the Executive Residence because it had fallen into disrepair. The chandelier almost fell on his wife. And no president has ever tried to stamp their personal stamp on the city of Washington the way Trump is now — by short-circuiting the normal process and using personal control in any meaningful way.
At this point, then, it’s fair to say that the mystery over the Reflecting Pool is not some kind of deviation from the broader agenda of the Trump administration. In fact it represents its main part: the personal investment of the president in changing the space around him.
Trump is getting in his own way
One of the primary resources that any White House must manage is attention. There are many issues where the White House can advance its priorities through the direct oversight of the president, but only for a few hours of the day. Making real progress in their issues thus requires a strategic deployment of the president and the time of his staff.
Trump’s desire for physical change is, quite clearly, not a strategic use of the presidency. Not that it’s harmless: In the Reflecting Pool case alone, he’s wasted millions of taxpayer dollars, awarded a no-bid deal to a felon who pleaded guilty, and threatened Americans with significant prison time.
Rather, they do not represent a strategic use of the president’s attention — for good or bad purposes. Nor is the amount of time wasted.
Because Trump doesn’t care much about compliance, his efforts in this area are often mired in lengthy bureaucratic and legal battles. This leads the president to spend more time posting about these issues on Social Truth, or talking about them with the press, drawing more attention to them and forcing the White House’s PR and legal teams to manage the consequences of his actions.
Physical things are just one example; if you look at Trump’s Social Reality feed, or read reports from inside his White House, it’s clear that he’s always chasing ephemera — the appearance of a victory rather than a real victory. The president, based on his history in reality TV, cares about image above all else.
This will be a problem in any presidency. But for someone with such big ambitions, it’s too bad.
It’s clear that Trump doesn’t want to be a normal president: His complete disdain for checks on his authority makes him act as if he were an elected dictator, and he frequently tries to use political power against his personal and political enemies. His more modern mentors — men like Russ Vought, Stephen Miller, and JD Vance — all have high hopes for how to use this Trumpian style for the purpose of bringing about ideological change.
Their combined efforts have been able to break down important aspects of the American government, such as congressional control the power of the purse. Not yet from very early onthey have also failed to reconcile this destruction with a greater consolidation of power. Trump’s policies continue to run into legal trouble, and his efforts to imprison his opponents are faltering. His constant effort until the by-elections, ranging from a national push to efforts to impose federal control over vote counting, have failed to stave off the looming threat of a Democratic midterm wave.
this”randomly“The authoritarian attitude is directly related to Trump’s appearance.
Trump is not the type of person who starts with a strategic plan to seize power, like someone like President Viktor Orban did in Hungary. Instead, he is a person who only does things that he feels like doing. While this can sometimes lead to lasting impressions and real-world policy implications — seeing his refusal to accept defeat in the 2020 election — it can also lead the president to prioritize image over the kind of sustained policy pursuits necessary to fulfill his dreams of unfettered power.
And it comes with a political cost that also undermines his ability to wield power: His approval rating continues to plummet, given the widespread perception that he is focusing on his priorities and not his own. Voters really notice his the desire of the ballroom eliminating issues such as inflation and health care.
This is not the only reason Trump is bad at governing: his lack of deep policy knowledge, disdain for traditional expertise, and tendency to surround himself with yes-men certainly all contribute to the problem.
But the dynamics of attention are important: they show a president too ill-disciplined to follow through on his bad promise. Trump’s obsession with a meaningless symbol like the Reflecting Pool may be one of the key factors behind his administration’s failure.
