Everything He Touches
From the Reflecting Pool to the Rose Garden to the Republic: a field guide to the disaster that follows him everywhere
Let us begin with the pool, because the pool is perfect.
The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool is 2,029 feet long, holds 6.5 million gallons of water, and has existed in its current form since 1922. It has reflected the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial through the March on Washington, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial dedication, and every presidential inauguration since Eisenhower. It is not a complicated object. It is a very large, very flat, very still body of water whose primary function is to hold still and reflect things.
Donald Trump looked at it and saw a problem to solve.
The solution was to hire a company called Atlantic Industrial Coatings, a Virginia-based firm, and pay them over $14 million to drain the pool and paint its bottom American Flag Blue, a color Trump selected personally to celebrate the nation’s 250th birthday. Historians and preservationists objected. The administration proceeded. The pool was drained, painted, and refilled with 6.5 million gallons of clean water. The project was declared complete. Trump called it beautiful.
Twelve days later, the algae returned.
Graeme Sloan / Bloomberg via Getty Images
The Trump administration’s vision of an azure expanse between Washington’s landmarks had been complicated by the harsh realities of chemistry and biology known to any backyard pool owner. The dark blue paint, chosen for its patriotic resonance, had created ideal conditions for the very problem it was supposed to solve. “Now that the bottom is nice and dark, it elevates the temperature and the algae grows better,” said an algae specialist from the Museum of Natural History. The Interior Department called the bloom “part of the normal startup process.” The pool turned chartreuse.
The response was to pour hydrogen peroxide into it. Workers were observed on June 16 dumping jugs of hydrogen peroxide directly into the pool. This would be notable on its own, but it becomes extraordinary when you recall that at the 2016 Rio Olympics, the diving pool turned green for exactly the same reason: a contractor added hydrogen peroxide to the water, it neutralized the chlorine, and algae bloomed immediately. That happened in public, globally, a decade ago. It was an international embarrassment widely reported in every language. The information that hydrogen peroxide turns pools green was not hidden or classified or buried in a technical journal. It was on the front page of every sports website on earth in August 2016.
As of June 18, the pool remains green in large sections, with blue material now peeling off the bottom and floating toward the surface. The contractor who painted it said the images did not provide enough information to tell exactly what the peeling material is. The Department of the Interior did not respond to requests for comment.
This is the complete disaster cycle, rendered in miniature, in a single public pool, over the course of two weeks. Identify something that is working. Decide it needs to be improved. Hire a questionable vendor at an inflated price. Ignore expert objections. Announce completion. Watch it fail. Apply a remedy that makes it worse. Deny responsibility. Let the thing rot while staff issues statements about startup processes.
If this were an isolated incident, it would be merely embarrassing. But Donald Trump has been running this exact cycle his entire adult life, at every scale, in every domain he has touched, and the Reflecting Pool is simply the latest and most photogenic example of a pattern that stretches from Atlantic City to Afghanistan.
Start with the properties. Six Trump casinos filed for bankruptcy, including the Taj Mahal, once described as the eighth wonder of the world, which entered bankruptcy within a year of opening. The Plaza Hotel, bankrupt. Trump Airlines, bankrupt. Trump Steaks, discontinued. Trump University, settled for $25 million in fraud claims. The USFL, a football league Trump joined specifically to compete with the NFL, sued the NFL for $1.7 billion in damages, won three dollars in court, and folded. Every one of these followed the same arc as the pool: acquisition, announcement, disaster, someone else’s fault.
Then the institutions he was handed rather than built. The Kennedy Center, where Trump installed himself as chairman and has spent two years replacing its programming with MAGA-approved entertainment while its artistic leadership and donors fled. The East Wing of the White House, currently being retrofitted for a ballroom nobody asked for. The Rose Garden, which was renovated in 2020 by Melania Trump, removing trees planted by Jacqueline Kennedy that had stood for six decades, replacing them with a design widely described as resembling a parking lot, for which the administration spent $1.75 million. The South Lawn of the White House, site of a professional cage fight last weekend in which a fighter called the former first lady a man into a microphone while the president nodded off in the front row.
Everything he touches.
Scale up to governance. The COVID-19 pandemic arrived in a country that had a functioning pandemic response infrastructure: a White House National Security Council directorate for global health security, a CDC deployed in China as an early warning system, stockpiled PPE, international cooperation frameworks. Trump had disbanded the NSC directorate in 2018. The CDC presence in China had been withdrawn. The stockpiles had been depleted and not replenished. When the pandemic arrived, the response was to hold rallies, promote hydroxychloroquine, suggest injecting disinfectant, federalize the PPE supply chain and then redirect it through private vendors connected to administration allies, and publicly contradict the public health officials whose job it was to manage the situation. Over a million Americans died.
Scale up further. The JCPOA, the Iran nuclear deal negotiated over twenty months by the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and China, had stretched Iran’s nuclear breakout time from weeks to more than a year and placed international inspectors on the ground. It was working. The IAEA confirmed it was working. Trump called it the worst deal in history and withdrew in 2018, handing Iran the justification it needed to restart enrichment. By 2025 Iran had accumulated enough 60-percent enriched uranium for multiple bombs. Trump then launched a war to fix the problem his withdrawal had created, killing thousands of people including children at a girls’ school on day one, closing the Strait of Hormuz, disrupting global oil markets, and eventually signing a two-page memorandum that may give Iran $300 billion in reconstruction money and leaves the nuclear question for negotiations that haven’t happened yet. He then called it the greatest deal in history.
The pool was working. He painted it. The deal was working. He tore it up. The pattern does not vary. The confidence does not waver. The consequences are always someone else’s startup process.
There is also the personal record, because the pattern predates the politics. The sexual assault finding, established by a jury in civil court in 2023. The 34 felony convictions for falsifying business records. The two impeachments. The January 6 attack on the Capitol, incited by a speech he delivered to a crowd he had assembled and inflamed and then watched on television as they beat police officers with American flags. The E. Jean Carroll settlement. The $175 million bond in the New York fraud case, reduced from $464 million after he was found to have fraudulently inflated his assets for decades. At every stage of his personal life, the same architecture: the action, the denial, the counterattack, the settlement or verdict, the claim of total exoneration that the record does not support.
The Reflecting Pool is chartreuse and peeling. The Rose Garden looks like a parking lot. The Kennedy Center is playing country music where the National Symphony played. The cage fight has been held on the lawn. Iran has more nuclear material than it had before the deal he tore up. A million Americans died in a pandemic he managed by contradicting the people paid to manage it. Six casinos went bankrupt. The USFL won three dollars.
The Interior Department did not respond to requests for comment about the peeling paint. The contractor says he cannot tell exactly what the peeling material is from the photographs. The algae specialist says the dark paint made conditions better for the algae. The pool is still green.
It will be green for a while. He has a talent for that.