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What Reflecting Pool reflects ain’t pretty

The clue for #55 down in the New York Times crossword puzzle for August 5 - "apt name for a groundskeeper" - got me thinking about other apt names, or "aptronyms." As it turns out, the world is full of them.

There was once a famous quarterback named Willie Thrower, and a horticulturist named Rose Bush. When I worked at KABC-TV in Los Angeles, our weatherman was Dallas Raines. Google also notes surgeon Dr. Cutter, orthopedist Dr. Bone, dentist Dr. Smiley, and plumbing manufacturer Thomas Crapper. We all remember a former congressman with the unfortunate aptronym Anthony Weiner. The groundskeeper's name, by the way, is Lon. And don't forget a journalist whose real name is Press.

But in Washington, nobody or nothing is more aptly named than the Reflecting Pool. Stretching out in front of the Lincoln Memorial, the Reflecting Pool was designed by Henry Bacon to be a mirror of water, reflecting and connecting the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Memorial. It used to be one of the most magical places in the capital. Especially at night, it took your breath away.

It's also one of Washington's most historic sites. Where 75,000 gathered on Easter Sunday 1939 to hear Marian Anderson sing, after she was banned from Constitution Hall, and where 250,000 cheered on Aug. 28, 1963, hearing Martin Luther King Jr. declare "I Have a Dream." And where, on Jan. 19, 2021, President-elect Joe Biden lined the rim with 400 lights, one for every thousand Americans dead from Covid-19.

But today, thanks to Donald Trump, the Reflecting Pool's nothing but a big, ugly, scar on the National Mall. I went there this week to see for myself. It's fenced off, so no one can get close. It's totally drained and empty, except for water leftover from this week's rainstorms. Its bottom is a dismal grey. And, though Trump promised to have the Reflecting Pool back, more beautiful than ever, by July 4, not one workman was in sight.

What happened to the Reflecting Pool reflects everything wrong about Donald Trump. As he relates, after a German tourist complained that the pool looked dirty, Trump - who'd already destroyed the Rose Garden and the East Wing of the White House - seized the Reflecting Pool as his latest personal destruction project.

On April 3, without consulting any experts or engineers, Trump ordered the Interior Department to gut and repaint the bottom of the pool "American flag blue." Then, in violation of federal construction guidelines, he awarded a no-bid contract to Atlantic Industrial Coatings, whose only similar experience had been painting a pool at his Virginia golf course.

There followed a string of lies. On May 27, he said the Reflecting Pool is "longer than the tallest building in the world if you set it on the side." It's not. He said it's "almost 200 feet wide." It's not. He said the whole renovation would take one week and cost $1.8 million. It didn't. It's August, it's still not finished, and it's already cost $14.7 million.

We all know what happened next. Atlantic Industrial drained the pool, repainted the bottom and refilled it. The pool filled with algae and turned green, not blue. The pool was drained and repainted again and again, but sheets of paint kept peeling and floating to the surface. At which point, falsely egged on by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, Trump claimed "vandals" had used "a very sharp knife or razors" to slice the paint, and later dumped fertilizer into the pool.

Trump then ordered the Justice Department to track down the "vandals," which US Attorney Jeanine Pirro promptly saluted and did, charging three people with misdemeanors and three-time Olympian David Carter Hearn with a felony for the "crime" of reaching down and touching a strip of the peeling blue paint.

The whole thing was so ridiculous it had to fall apart. And it did on July 31, when Pirro suddenly dropped charges against Hearn and others, while admitting that problems with the Reflecting Pool were the result of "botched workmanship," not vandalism.

Reportedly, the result was a contentious, finger-pointing, Oval Office confrontation between Trump, Pirro and Burgum. But all three are guilty. Pirro for filing charges with zero evidence to back them up, Burgum for blaming it on vandals and Trump himself, for lying about the entire operation and still blaming it on vandals.

The Reflecting Pool. Again, how aptly named. Because nothing better reflects the stupidity, incompetence, cruelty and criminality of the Trump administration.
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(Bill Press is host of The BillPressPod, and author of 10 books, including: "From the Left: My Life in the Crossfire." His email address is: bill@billpress.com. Readers may also follow him on Twitter @billpresspod and on BlueSky @BillPress.bsky.social.)

Let us now praise Dr. Anthony Fauci

Whatever you say about Joe Biden, he got one thing right. Actually, a whole lot more than one thing. But one thing we can be grateful for today is that, before leaving office, he gave Dr. Anthony Fauci a preemptive presidential pardon.

In announcing Fauci's pardon, Biden said it was not because Fauci had done anything wrong. It was to protect Fauci from threats of "unjustified and politically-motivated prosecutions" in the future.

Bingo! How prescient was that? "Unjustified and politically-motivated prosecutions" was exactly what we saw this week in the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, where Fauci was subpoenaed to testify by Chairman Rand Paul (R-KY), who for years, without any evidence, has accused Fauci of both causing the Covid crisis and profiting from it.

To understand how outrageous this is, let's remember the early days of Covid in the White House. There were two main players. First, Donald Trump, who initially refused to take the virus seriously. He compared it to the common flu, telling people "Just stay calm. It will go away." He suggested Covid could be prevented by ingesting bleach. He opposed making vaccines mandatory, wearing masks, and canceling public gatherings - and lashed out at governors who did so.

On the other hand, in the same White House news conferences, there was the calm, steady voice of his chief medical adviser, Dr. Anthony Fauci, who warned Americans to take the Covid threat seriously, to wear masks, to get vaccinated as soon as it was available, to avoid close physical contact, and to wash your hands for at least 20 seconds with the hottest water possible.

What's wrong with this picture? Who knows how many lives were lost because so many people listened to Trump rather than Fauci? And now Republicans are going after Fauci and not Trump? This is insane. They refuse to hold Trump responsible for January 6. And they won't hold him responsible for mishandling the Covid crisis, either.

Paul's hearing may have been long on drama - he ordered Fauci's attorney escorted out of the room - but it was short on substance. He leveled four charges against Fauci, based on excerpts from a private diary Fauci kept during the Covid Crisis, from December 2019 to December 2022, or what Paul calls "Tony's Diary."

OK, stop right there. What right does the federal government have to seize anyone's personal diary and make it public? None! But the law never stops the Trump administration. In this case, over eight months, Fauci's diary was dug up and handed over to Rand Paul by - wait for it - HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Paul's first charge. That Fauci believed the virus spread from animals to humans, what's called the "natural spillover" theory. While Paul, again without evidence, insisted the virus was deliberately spread by a laboratory in China. Most scientists, and the World Health Organization, agree with Fauci. Paul accuses him of a coverup. The truth is, we still don't know, and may never know, how Covid was started.

Second charge. Fauci misled the public, based on a diary entry where Fauci admits that Covid was already out there before being detected at a Wuhan market. However, in his diary, Fauci acknowledges that the market was an "amplifier" of the market (his words), not the original source. Again, nobody knows where and when. All we know is, as Fauci writes, "Somehow the virus jumped from animals to humans."

Third charge. Fauci lost the president's trust. No kidding! Guilty as charged. Who wouldn't lose trust in a president who belittled the disease and talked such nonsense. In his diary, Fauci describes Trump's press conferences as "painfully rambling" and "stream of consciousness" and accused him of "spewing nonsense" on the campaign trail in 2020. Note: Fauci wrote that in his diary. He never said it publicly.

Fourth and final charge. According to Paul, Dr. Fauci let his celebrityhood go to his head. And, while it's true that Fauci acknowledges how exciting it was to get such national media attention, he also says it made him very uncomfortable. "Geez!! I do not like this one bit," he told his diary.

Good for Anthony Fauci. He refused to play Rand Paul's game. He took the Fifth Amendment rather than respond to Paul's ridiculous questioning, designed only to trip him up.

Rand Paul's wrong. Anthony Fauci doesn't deserve to be put "behind bars." For 50 years of public health leadership, he deserves a statue on the National Mall.

Black and white portrait of an elderly man smiling in a suit and glasses.