Day after day, President Donald Trump crowed about his success, saying he had achieved something his predecessors could not. Then, the illusion snapped. The project fell apart. Things were not better; if anything, they were worse off than before. The cut corners and headlong rush yielded a temporary thrill for the president and a waste of money for taxpayers.

I’m referring to Trump’s very expensive and rapidly unraveling attempts to overhaul the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool on the National Mall, though the description could apply to many issues from the Trump presidency. My colleague Ja’han Jones described the once again algae-coated site as “a physical swamp that serves as a potent metaphor for [the Trump] administration’s corruption and incompetence.” The hastily done renovation and its swift demise are simply the most recent example of a pattern in which Trump and his allies’ bold declarations collapse under the pressures of time, scrutiny and common sense.

For weeks, Trump has hyped the Reflecting Pool project alongside his other beautification side hustles. He’s blamed his predecessors, particularly Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden, for not fully fixing the pool’s many issues. Over the course of several weeks, the pool was drained and repainted, with a layer of sealant applied to prevent the leaks that have plagued the pool for years. The Trump administration gave a $14 million no-bid contract to a firm that worked on pools at one of Trump’s golf clubs. (The firm is also reportedly owned by a Trump donor and, according to a government analysis, got the contract at an “inflated” profit margin.)

The intention was to have the Washington landmark looking better than ever (or at least more Trumpian) in time for events surrounding America’s 250th birthday. Instead, the pool’s shallow surface is coated in more algae than has been seen there in years, The Washington Post reports. Videos taken Friday showed the “American Flag Blue” paint that Trump bragged about already peeling away. The speedy devolution of the vaunted project could have been predicted from the start, or it may have been helped along by the hydrogen peroxide used last week to help kill the algae clusters that had already formed.

The Trump administration blamed the algae’s return on residual amounts remaining in the pipes while the renovation was underway. When the blooms continued and the coating began to peel, the president accused “Radical Left Wing Lunatics” of using chemicals in the Reflecting Pool “to try to destroy and demean our beautiful work.” As ever, the real fault must have lain with anyone but Trump. But there’s no such excuse for the many other examples of administration hubris that have ended in the same fashion.

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‘For what?’: Hosts blast Trump’s $14.7M reflecting pool disaster, as paint peels and algae blooms

June 19, 2026 / 04:35

Last year, Trump’s pal Elon Musk — who recently became the world’s first trillionaire — led an effort to slash billions of dollars in federal spending. Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency project was empowered in large part by Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget, who has long sought to shrink the federal workforce. Both men framed their slash-and-burn efforts as ridding the government of unnecessary bloat, which nobody had had the courage to do before.

Instead, within months, the mass layoffs proved to have deeply affected vital work. For example, the Internal Revenue Service was forced to rehire staffers only weeks after forcing them out of their roles. The result wasn’t enough to prevent a drop in revenue reported last year as the IRS lost a good chunk of its enforcement capabilities.

In a similar (but grosser) vein, the administration saw fit to slash funding last year for monitoring and preventing screwworm flies, flesh-eating parasites that can lay their eggs in the open wounds of livestock. A 2020 article in The Atlantic noted that the program “costs $15 million a year, a small fraction of the estimated $796 million a year that it saves American farmers.” (That estimate was from 1996, so farmers’ savings were closer to $1.7 billion annually, adjusted for inflation.) Since that funding was cut, screwworm flies have become a problem in Southwestern America for the first time in decades, prompting an emergency $1 billion response from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Again, this was meant to be a cost-saving measure.

The most obvious point of comparison must be Trump’s needless war against Iran. When the U.S. launched operations in late February, the administration touted a showcase of American strength toward Tehran unlike anything previous presidents had been willing to do. In 2018, Trump had torn up an Obama-era nuclear agreement to stymie Iran’s capabilities and has steadfastly insisted that he would be able to get a much better deal. The administration’s shifting rationale for war inevitably drifted back to the claim that America would be much better off in the long run.

Now that a “memorandum of understanding” ending the conflict has been released, it’s clear how far from true that is. The biggest achievement for the U.S. and its multibillion-dollar bombing campaign was more or less restoring the prewar status quo. Any hope of pulling an actual victory from the jaws of declared victory rests on negotiating in the coming two months an agreement the likes of which had previously been hammered out over the course of years — before Trump threw that deal in the trash.

There’s one more thing that unites all these cases: Trump’s inability to admit that he messed up. As my colleague Steve Benen noted, things weren’t perfect before the president’s unnecessary interventions, but if he had kept his hands to himself, they would be imperfect in a stable, predictable manner. Instead, chaos agent that he is, Trump has repeatedly taken a sledgehammer to a load-bearing wall and expected thanks for creating a cool, refreshing breeze.

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