So long, metaphor. We had a good run. Goodbye, “All the world’s a stage.” Farewell, “She’s a brick house.” See you later, the swamp (drained or undrained). Now we have a symbolic black hole in the middle of Washington, D.C., that is pulling all other symbols into its orbit and devouring them, one by one.
I am, of course, talking about the Reflecting Pool. That is what everyone is talking about, even and especially the president. Nothing is ever going to top it except, of course, the thin green coat of algae that Greenwater Solutions—seems nominally determinative, in a bad way—is trying to spritz with nanobubbles. (“It’s magic!” the man operating the hose assured me yesterday when I walked by.)
The Reflecting Pool is a metaphor so perfect, it feels almost valedictory, as though symbolism as a whole gave up and decided to sign off. On its way out, it killed a duck.
“Our pool is bigger than skyscrapers,” Trump boasted a few weeks ago. With a chart! This is one of those things that, living in 2026, you get inured to but shouldn’t. Imagine, if you will, any other president or world leader holding up a sign that says, “Our pool is bigger than skyscrapers.” You would say, “This man’s brain is bad.” You would say, “What is this man talking about?” You would say, “Is this a riddle? If I get this right, will I wake up?”
This is the kind of shallow, surface-level concern (a bit on the nose, isn’t it?) that the president loves to fixate on. He has never seen a problem so intractable that he cannot pay one of his cronies to make it immediately and obviously worse. That is why the pool is full of ozone and tax dollars, forming a thick slurry in which algae can grow more vigorously. If they become sentient and we play our cards right, they might even be prevailed upon to perform at Freedom 250!
Go home, everyone! We are all full up on symbolism, thanks. Trump is building a triumphal arch that will effectively frame Robert E. Lee’s mansion? No, no thank you. We have all the metaphor we need. We’re planning to give welcome bags to refugees from South Africa with PragerU materials that downplay the horrors of slavery? No, again, stop. We understand. You have already done the storytelling. This is overkill.
This metaphor has everything. A reflective, decorative pool from 1923, intended to show off our American monuments. That pool has some structural and cosmetic problems that have only grown worse with time and have resisted easy fixes. And Donald Trump tried an easy fix, and that easy fix didn’t work? And now he’s blaming the failure of the lining on saboteurs who come by night and stab the pool with knives? Saboteurs, and also President Obama! Great. And the media. Wonderful! The gang’s all here!
The best metaphors gently move you away from what you are looking at so that you can see it more clearly. The Iliad is awash in farming metaphors. The wholesale slaughter on the plains outside Troy is constantly likened to harvest, planting, herding flocks. You would think this might soften what it’s describing, but it actually makes it more wrenching, jerking the reader out of the killing fields into fields where what gets buried in the earth might sprout again.
The Reflecting Pool is not that kind of metaphor. The thing it points to is just more of the same. It is so aggressively stupid in such a perfectly predictable way that it makes the routine stupidity of everything feel somehow fresh and surprising. Here, let’s destroy a physical manifestation of the country’s pride using the same bulletproof techniques that we’ve used to destroy its metaphorical institutions! Once more, as farce! Once more, with algae!
But usually, when the Trump administration supplies us with such an obvious, on-the-nose metaphor, there are people trapped inside it. That’s the seductiveness of the Reflecting Pool. It’s the rare example where everything goes wrong but no one gets hurt, except maybe a duck or two. Perhaps this makes it easier to look at. All fun and games, at least until the saboteurs start getting arrested.
Or perhaps it’s not that deep. Maybe not being that deep is what makes the pool so good a metaphor.
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