What should one make of the president’s mounting obsession with the Reflecting Pool?
On the surface, it’s ridiculous. Noting that the pool was full of algae and not reflecting as well as it should, President Donald Trump launched an expensive beautification effort — repainting the bottom and trying chemical treatments to treat the algae. The end result: a new algae bloom likely caused by the new paint color.
Go a little deeper, and it’s ominous. Trump bypassed normal federal contracting procedures to provide a no-bid contract for Reflecting Pool beautification to a personal acquaintance who had previously pled guilty to conspiracy to bribe a politician. When it went badly, the president started lobbing accusations without evidence about saboteurs mucking up his very strong and very beautiful renovation. Now Trump says six people have been arrested on vandalism charges, including a former US Olympian, David Hearn, who claims he merely touched material in the pool. Trump is threatening alleged vandals with 10-year prison sentences.
Go deeper still, and it’s a metaphor for any number of different dysfunctions in the current White House, from ignoring experts to scapegoating failures.
But if we get down to the American-flag blue bottom of it, the Reflecting Pool saga reflects the most basic dynamic of the second Trump administration: He’s an authoritarian at heart — and also very bad at authoritarianism.
Over and over again, Trump has proven to be unfocused, distractable, and self-sabotaging — and the culprit, as now, is frequently a small symbolic issue that blows up into a giant proxy war over his ego. If American democracy proves resilient in his second term, these time-consuming distractions will be a major part of the story.
Trump’s shiny obsessions
Donald Trump has always been a gaudy man. What often catches and holds the president’s interests are symbolic issues of no particular substantive importance.
This has been true since the beginning of Trump’s first term. On his very first day after being inaugurated, he insisted that he had the largest inauguration crowd in history. When overhead photos proved that wasn’t true, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer was forced to spend his first briefing lying to the press corps’ face — irreparably damaging his reputation.
But in his second term, Trump’s obsession with appearances has turned into a specific kind of fixation befitting his real estate background — a preoccupation with physically altering both the White House and Washington, DC, more broadly. There are dozens of examples, but here are a few notable ones:
While previous presidents had launched efforts to revamp the White House, they typically did so for clear functional reasons: President Harry Truman redid the Executive Residence because it had become so structurally unsound that a chandelier nearly fell on his wife. And no president had ever attempted to put their personal mark on the city of Washington in the way Trump currently is — by short-circuiting the usual process and exercising personal control by any means necessary.
At this point, then, it is fair to say that the kerfuffle over the Reflecting Pool is not some kind of deviation from the Trump administration’s broader agenda. It in fact represents a core part of it: the president’s deep personal investment in altering the physical space surrounding him.
Trump is getting in his own way
One of the basic resources any White House has to manage is attention. There are innumerable issues where the White House could advance its priorities through direct presidential attention, but only a finite number of hours in the day. Making real progress on their issues thus requires a strategic deployment of the president and his staff’s time.
Trump’s obsession with physical alterations is, quite obviously, not a strategic use of presidential time. Not that it’s harmless: In just the Reflecting Pool case, he has wasted millions in taxpayer money, handed out a no-bid contract to a confessed criminal, and threatened Americans with significant jail time.
Rather, they do not represent strategic uses of presidential attention — for either beneficial or nefarious purposes. Nor is the amount of time wasted trivial.
Because Trump cares little about following rules, his efforts in this area often get caught up in lengthy bureaucratic and legal struggles. These lead the president to spend extensive amounts of time posting about these issues on Truth Social, or talking about them with reporters, dragging more attention onto them and forcing the White House PR and legal teams to manage the consequences of his actions.
The physical stuff is but one example; if you look at Trump’s Truth Social feed, or read reports from inside his White House, it’s clear that he’s constantly chasing ephemera — the appearance of a victory rather than a substantive win. The president, befitting his background in reality TV, cares about image above all else.
This would be a problem in any presidency. But for one with such grand ambitions, it’s devastating.
It is clear that Trump does not want to be a normal president: His complete disdain for checks on his power leads him to act as if he were an elected dictator, and he repeatedly attempts to wield political power against both his personal and political enemies. His most sophisticated advisers — men like Russ Vought, Stephen Miller, and JD Vance — all have grand ambitions for how to harness this Trumpian style for transformative ideological purposes.
Their combined efforts have managed to break key elements of the US government, like congressional control over the power of the purse. Yet from very early on, they’ve also failed to pair this damage with substantive consolidation of power. Trump’s policies keep running into legal problems, and his efforts to jail his enemies are floundering. His repeated efforts to suborn elections, ranging from a nationwide gerrymandering push to efforts to centralize federal control over vote-counting, have failed to avert the looming threat of a Democratic midterm wave.
This “haphazard” approach to authoritarianism is directly related to Trump’s obsession with appearances.
Trump is not the kind of person who starts with a strategic plan for seizing power, in the way that someone like President Viktor Orban did in Hungary. Rather, he is someone who simply does things that he feels like doing. While this sometimes can produce sustained obsessions with real-world policy implications — see his refusal to admit defeat in the 2020 election — it can also cause the president to prioritize imagery over the kind of sustained policy follow-through necessary to make his dreams of unfettered power into reality.
And it comes with a political cost that also weakens his ability to wield power: His approval ratings keep scraping new lows, thanks in part to a widespread perception that his focus is on his priorities and not their own. Voters really do notice his ballroom obsession crowding out issues like inflation and healthcare.
This is not the only reason Trump is bad at authoritarianism: His lack of substantive policy knowledge, disdain for traditional expertise, and tendency to surround himself with yes-men certainly all contribute to the problem.
But the attentional dynamics matter: they reflect a president too undisciplined to make good on his deadly promise. The Trump obsession with meaningless symbolism like the Reflecting Pool may prove to be one of the most important elements behind his administration’s looming failure.
