What kind of pool-cleaning gear does $14.2 million buy? According to the Department of the Interior, who oversaw recent renovations to the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool, it’ll get you “high-tech nanobubble ozone technology,” which may or may not be as impressive as it sounds.
It also apparently buys a whole lot of bleach.
On Tuesday morning, workers in neon vests knelt along the reflecting pool, dumping hydrogen peroxide in the algae-filled water. The sight might have been questionable any other time, but it was more so given that Trump’s recent renovations to the Washington, D.C. landmark—which began in April—had been completed just days earlier. Still, the same plant-based eyesores the pool’s glow-up was meant to address had returned right away, despite the significant expenditure.
If this sequence of events sounds familiar—a questionably necessary, wildly costly undertaking does not resolve as cleanly as Trump says it will—that’s because the reflecting pool debacle offers a clear reflection of an infinitely more important fiasco that refuses tidy resolution: Trump’s war in Iran, which is, yet again, purportedly on the verge of ending.
False urgency and no approval
Both initiatives began seemingly out of the blue—not to be confused with the “American flag blue” Trump chose to color the pool’s floor.
The start of the war was incredibly sudden. Despite long-simmering tensions between the U.S. and Iran, including Trump’s bombing campaign against the region’s nuclear sites last June, direct military conflict began abruptly on February 28 with the U.S. and Israel’s sweeping, coordinated strikes against Iranian nuclear sites, military infrastructure, and top leadership.
Although Trump framed Operation Epic Fury, a name that reeks of Axe Body Spray, as a defensive response to Iranian aggression—and also, somehow, as a catalyst for Iranian liberation—he has yet to reveal a concrete reason why the attacks needed to happen just when they did. (Political jesters often suggest it was to distract from the Epstein files.) Nor has Trump offered much in the way of compelling rationale for why he sidestepped congressional approval, beyond that he felt like he should. As for how long what he briefly referred to as “a little excursion” would go on for, he initially said the war would last “four to five weeks.”
That was 15 weeks ago and counting.
The president’s plans for the reflecting pool appear similarly executed on a whim. Back in April, Trump described the pool as “filthy” and proposed out of left field a fast, inexpensive transformation using the “latest and greatest filament.” Rather than seek standard congressional approval or go through a formal competitive bidding process, the president instead awarded a no-bid contract to a team that had worked on swimming pools at his golf club in Sterling, Virginia. At the time, Trump predicted the project would cost “$1.5 million to $2 million.”
Once again, he gave no compelling reason why the project had to happen at that particular moment, and with such scant planning, other than wanting “to move fast so the work would be complete before the country’s 250th festivities this summer.”
Mission creep
Within a few weeks of the renovation project’s arbitrary launch date, the cost had ballooned to seven times its initial projections: $13.1 million. (An additional $1.1 million has since found its way into the price tag, for a total of $14.2 million.) Beyond the announced effort to “repair leaking joints between the pool’s concrete slabs, waterproof the pool’s bottom, and paint it ‘American flag blue,’” Trump would now be giving the pool a sparklier makeover.
“I originally thought I’d do it for $2 or $3 million,” he told reporters in May. “Just do a base. But now we are fixing up the exterior of it so we will probably be in it for less than $20 million.”
Additional touch-ups now include those exterior surfaces and surrounding areas of the six-acre pool basin, along with a new purification system and a deep cleaning to prep for the paint job. All of it suggests a haphazard strategy that had not accounted for all the moving parts involved.
Meanwhile, the war in Iran, also pitched as a cakewalk in the early going, endured a much more drastic and consequential case of mission creep.
Though the president’s stated objectives in the war were never quite coherent, he started out talking mainly of obliterating Iran’s nuclear capabilities—which somehow survived the complete obliteration he’d announced the previous summer—and liberating the Iranian people. Soon enough, he’d pivoted to total war with the goal of “unconditional surrender.”
In the first weeks, however, Trump had not yet personally witnessed the strength of Iran’s iron grip on the Strait of Hormuz, a major chokepoint for the world’s oil and gas supplies. Only once the region sustained its blockade of oil ships passing through, thus driving up gas prices more than $1 per gallon amid other knock-on economic effects, did one of Trump’s top goals become opening up the Strait of Hormuz, which had previously been open before the war.
The president had created a new problem he hadn’t set out to solve.
Worse off than we were before
This is the crux of Trump’s parallel approaches to war in the Middle East and a relatively piddling renovation project in the U.S. capital: neither appears destined to meet its stated objectives, due to complications that were entirely foreseeable.
The reflecting pool’s algae problems go back much further than Trump’s predecessors. The structure was built in the 1920s, on top of marshland, and sank significantly over the ensuing decades, causing cracks and leaks. Because of those leaks and the absence of a circulation system, it used to be emptied, cleaned and refilled twice a year, at great cost, until receiving a $34 million renovation between 2010 and 2012, paid for by Obama-era stimulus funds.
Although those renovations improved circulation and water loss and averted further sinking, they did not fix the algae problem. In taking a crack at eliminating that algae himself, Trump’s mistake seems to be assuming his predecessor failed simply because he wasn’t, in fact, Trump.
That same broken, narcissistic logic also hangs over the war with Iran.
Trump has long insulted Obama’s Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which the former president negotiated with Iran in 2015. After succeeding Obama as president, he voided the agreement, claiming the U.S. had capitulated by giving Iran a $150 billion payout—something the U.S. absolutely did not do—and that the agreement merely delayed Iran’s nuclear program. (It remains unclear exactly how pulling out of the JCPOA in 2018 was meant to further keep the region’s nuclear program at bay.)
Now, Trump is finding out the hard way that negotiating with Iran does not magically get any easier just because you wrote your name is on the cover of a bestselling book about Deals.
Much like algae promptly returning to the reflecting pool after Trump’s renovations, Iran’s nuclear aims and ability to control the Strait of Hormuz appear on track to return following the preliminary deal Trump reached with Iran over the weekend. And if Trump was aghast at Obama’s deal because it unfroze $150 billion in Iranian assets that had been held abroad, he’s probably not going to love that the secretive deal he just struck reportedly involves “ensuring financing of $300 billion” for Iran, “ending all types of sanctions” for Iran, and making fully available an untold amount of “frozen funds and assets” belonging to Iran.
Try as he may to erase Obama’s legacy, with both his stubbornly puke-green pool and an Iran deal Republicans hate, Trump has finally become a reflection of his old nemesis.