This column was originally published by TheStatehouseFile.com.
By John Krull
TheStatehouseFile.com
June 26, 2026
In the future, historians will point to the strange episode of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool as a revealing portrait in miniature that explains how so much went wrong during Donald Trump’s presidency.
For those who, perhaps blissfully, haven’t been paying attention, Trump has been obsessed with the saga of the pool. He wanted it to be clear and blue. He insisted that he and he alone would be the person to fix it.
Without consulting anyone or putting the project out for competitive bidding, the president hired his own pool guy to do the job. The settled price paid to the contractor ended up being about three or four times the going rate for such a project.
The renovation turned out to be a disaster.
Algae reappeared almost immediately. Rips appeared in the newly installed lining—rips that Trump insisted, without presenting any supporting evidence, were the work of vandals who hated either him or America.
And the water turned cloudy and green—a sickly shade of green.
Trump’s response to this turn of events has been classically Trumpian. He’s searched desperately for someone else to blame for the costly debacle.
And he’s disavowed all responsibility for any mistakes or miscues—even though the whole thing was his idea and he cut anyone who had any expertise in the area out of the decision-making process.
That’s why the embarrassing incident proves such insight into why Trump fails so often as the nation’s commander-in-chief.
In the first place, there’s the question of priorities.
Many Americans—a disproportionate number of whom voted for him—now are staggering under the burdens galloping inflation and high prices have placed on their budgets and lives. The war with Iran that the president started almost on a whim now threatens to turn into a long-lasting quagmire, one that likely will be a drag on not just America’s but also the world’s economy.
And, of course, Russia’s unprovoked war against Ukraine continues and may be escalating as Russian thug-in-charge Vladimir Putin, fearing defeat, has started issuing ominous, even apocalyptic, warnings to the United States and Europe.
In short, there are huge, huge problems confronting this country and the world—problems that would consume all the energy and attention of any responsible, capable person who occupies the Oval Office.
Yet, Donald Trump has the time and the bandwidth to worry about and focus on a cosmetic thing like the color of the water in a reflecting pool.
Wherever Trump’s eyes might be, they clearly aren’t on the prize.
But then there’s also the classically Trumpy way he went about the whole thing. Because he has active hostility to experts—people who’ve actually studied challenges and determined ways to meet them—he blundered into a bad situation and found a way to make it even worse.
At great cost, of course.
His distrust of people who know things because they’ve done their homework leads him into one easily avoidable disaster after another.
Trump’s approach to challenges is the same, regardless of whether it involves going to war with Iran or attacking algae in a reflecting pool. He treats the generals who warned him that attacking Iran would result in the Iranians shutting down the Strait of Hormuz with the same contempt that he does the scientists who tried to instruct him on the conditions that produce algae in bodies of water.
As know-it-alls who need to be put in their place.
His disregard for education and expertise makes it difficult, if not impossible, for this president to anticipate and plan for setbacks or otherwise predictable difficulties. Every miscue, however minor, escalates quickly to a trainwreck for this reason.
Similarly, because he is incapable of assuming responsibility for any mistake, he cannot learn from those mistakes.
Thus, whether the problem is as large as war in the Middle East or as small as fixing a manmade body of water, he makes the same errors over and over and over again.
That’s why the story of the reflecting pool is so instructive.
It reflects on so much more than the Lincoln Memorial.
John Krull is director of Franklin College’s Pulliam School of Journalism and publisher of TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students. The views expressed are those of the author only and should not be attributed to Franklin College. Also, the views and opinions expressed are those of the author only and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Indiana Citizen or any other affiliated organization.
