W
hen he first campaigned for president a decade ago, Donald Trump pointed to his singular achievement in public service: a skating rink. A primetime video at Trump’s nominating convention recounted the legend of Wollman Rink, on the edge of Central Park, as if it were the beaches of Normandy — how Trump had grown tired of seeing the dilapidated rink from his panoramic office window and decided to do something about it, how he had taken over the project from the city and delivered a beautiful surface in record time. OK, maybe Trump couldn’t tell you what the nuclear triad was, but he was a guy who knew how to build stuff, first class all the way.
So I guess it’s fitting that the most powerful symbol of Trump’s second term is the sickly green Reflecting Pool at the base of the Lincoln Memorial, which is pretty much just a long skating rink that you don’t even have to freeze. Trump hired a company that worked on one of his golf courses to refinish the pool, and the contractor installed temporary machines to keep algae from blooming, but then Trump’s Park Service ordered the machines removed because they were ugly and the country was trying to have a birthday party here, for fuck’s sake, and within hours the algae started taking over, and then long sections of the “American-flag blue” paint started breaking off like icebergs, and now the site upon which Martin Luther King Jr. once gazed while describing his dream of racial unity looks like an abandoned hotel pool in a horror flick. First class, indeed.
