“Let’s go talk to the ducks,” John Hickenlooper, the Democratic senator from Colorado, said. It was midafternoon on a rainy Tuesday, and Hickenlooper’s colleagues in the Senate were trying, after multiple failed attempts, to invoke a war-powers resolution directing President Donald Trump to withdraw the nation’s armed forces from hostilities with Iran. Hickenlooper, though, was at the other end of the National Mall, walking along the Reflecting Pool with several staffers. The senator knelt at the edge of the water to warn a raft of seven ducks about an impending threat in their midst. That weekend, a duck’s carcass had been discovered floating in the pool, which had been blanketed in algae. “Ruuun! Don’t stay here,” Hickenlooper said, waving his arms. “Run for your lives. Run for freedom!”
Two other visitors chatted amiably with the senator as he yelled at the birds. Standing at another side of the pool, a staffer was pointing a professional camera at him. Hickenlooper turned to the two visitors. “You know we’re going to post that on video,” he said. “Is that O.K.?” The women moved out of frame. The ducks did not run.
In the past week, the Reflecting Pool, usually a backdrop to selfies and the Capitol’s dramas, has shifted to the foreground. After Trump spent close to fifteen million dollars in taxpayer funds on sandblasting and resurfacing the pool in “American Flag Blue,” the project was thwarted by algae, which turned the water a Mountain Dew shade of green. Then strips of the blue coating floated to the top of the water, and Trump accused “vandals” of slashing it. “They went in there with a knife,” he said from the Oval Office, adding that police had launched an investigation and arrested some individuals who were allegedly involved, though he did not release any names. But Trump’s critics saw only corruption and incompetence. Hickenlooper had taken time out of his day to make a video about it. “It’s going to say, ‘President Trump, this belongs to the American people, and yet the shame here belongs to you, and you should pay for the problems,’ ” he told me, in between takes.
For every landmark the President tinkers with, he seems to create an equal and opposite sight: an anti-monument. The U.S. Census Bureau defines the D.C. metropolitan area as the country’s seventh largest, but another truth is that the nation’s capital is a small town, where perceived encroachments are met with disbelief, open mockery, and knee-jerk resistance. With his stalled renovations, Trump may have given rise to a new kind of sightseeing, one animated not by reverence but by perverse curiosity.
Last December, the board of trustees at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts decided to rebrand the institution by having workers add “The Donald J. Trump and” on top of his predecessor’s name, on the front façade. The change was part of the President’s efforts to revitalize and fund-raise for the Center, which he claimed badly needed help. Months later, a federal judge ruled that this was illegal, and told the board to remove Trump’s name by June 12th, just before his eightieth birthday. Hundreds of visitors flocked to the building, which sits on the banks of the Potomac River, to see the name come down, and several live streams were set up. On the night of the deadline, Rina Paz, a seventy-year-old retired international financial adviser, was watching a performance by the National Symphony Orchestra.“I couldn’t even sit still,” she told me. “My daughter had the live cam in her purse.” When the symphony got to the last song of the program, she couldn’t bear the wait any longer. “I said, you know, ‘I can’t, I gotta go out there, I just gotta go out there.’ So we just left. The last song, we didn’t hear. ‘American in Paris,’ or whatever. I said, ‘I’ve heard that one enough.’ ”
After waiting three hours at the Center, Paz went home to her apartment, at the Watergate complex. She put the live stream on the TV and fell asleep. When she woke up around half past three in the morning, she was shocked to see that a construction crew had installed a gigantic plastic tarp around some scaffolding so as to obscure the work. The tarp seemed only to intensify the intrigue around the sign—had the letters really come down?—and has become an attraction in itself, with a pilgrimage of unbelievers trying to find gaps in the plastic to peek through. “I don’t think the tarp symbolizes anything but Donald Trump being embarrassed, because the name has come down,” Joyce Beatty, the Democratic congresswoman from Ohio who sued to undo the rebranding, said in an interview.
An armed security guard, wearing small mirrored sunglasses and standing within the tarp’s barricaded area, provided little information. The guards, he said, were kept unaware of what was happening behind the tarp, “for that exact purpose—if one of you comes asking.” (A spokesperson for the Center has said that the tarp will remain up while work is conducted on the Italian marble and soffit panels.) Kemal Tuncer, a sixty-year-old Maryland resident who works in tech operations, who’d ridden his celeste Bianchi road bike to the Center from Kensington, told me he wasn’t a hundred per cent sure that the name was really gone. Visiting the building was just one stop on what he called his “Tour of Mock,” the next being the Reflecting Pool. Tuncer had seen a photo of the letter “D” being removed, “but that doesn’t mean anything,” he said. “There’s a lot more letters after that.” The Washington Post published behind-the-tarp photos of the sign, sans all those letters, a few nights later.
The atmosphere at the pool these days is less reflective than it is defensive. According to Trump, six people have been arrested in connection with the alleged vandalism at the pool. One of them was David Hearn, a former Olympic canoeist, who told the Times that he’d been arrested for destruction of government property after he reached into the water to touch a strip of the peeling blue coating. “I was just a curious, concerned citizen,” he said. After some workers manually fished out algae and additional filtration machines were installed, the water has turned mostly blue again, with some splotches of lime green.
Still, law enforcement is proceeding with caution: on Tuesday, as heavy rain pelted D.C., I counted about two dozen National Guard members patrolling the pool in groups of three, plus a squadron of six police officers from Oklahoma in navy uniforms. A group of five U.S. Marshals stood near the Washington Monument end of the pool, and a couple of U.S. Park Police officers also ambled by. “Stay out of the water, please!” one National Guardsman said to a girl who couldn’t have been older than six, and who had dipped her hand in the pool. “All we know,” one National Guardswoman told me, as two others stood watch behind her, “is that it’s a felony crime to tamper with the pool.”
The militarized ambiance didn’t bother Olga Ruiz, a woman visiting with her daughter, each of them under a Ritz-Carlton umbrella. “We are from California,” she told me. “We know what algae looks like, and it is not in this water.” Ruiz supports the President, and feels that he doesn’t get enough credit. She seemed particularly inspired from visiting another monument, Arlington National Cemetery. “There are some people that paid the ultimate price for this great America that we live in,” she said. “The cost—fourteen billion, fourteen million, whatever it is—we ought to be willing to spend that money here.” As far as the arrests? “If you were arrested,” she said, “then you did something wrong.”
An aerospace-engineering professor named Mujahid Abdulrahim, who was visiting from Kansas City, Missouri, also seemed willing to cut the President—or the National Park Service—some slack. “As a homeowner who has a fountain, sometimes the struggle is real,” Abdulrahim said, “so I empathize deeply with anyone trying to maintain any body of water that retains clarity for any length of time.” Trump’s new struggle involves draining, repairing, and refilling the pool back up before the festivities commemorating the two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. On Tuesday afternoon, work crews began installing some chain-link fences around a part of the pool.
Later that evening, the skies cleared, and the Washington Monument’s reflection had returned to the pool, the surface like a freshly Windexed mirror. A woman walked along one of its edges with a tote bag that read “Water Nerd.” She was an attendee of the American Water Works Association conference, at the Convention Center, where she said the hallways were abuzz with chatter about the algae. She’d come to see it for herself, toying with the idea of touching the bottom to feel the coating. She said that her husband had called her, warning, “Don’t touch it!” ♦