Ten years ago, in the final weeks of his first presidential campaign, Donald Trump often led rallygoers in a chant: “Drain the swamp! Drain the swamp!” This week, it might finally happen.
The land where the Lincoln Memorial sits used to be mudflats and wetlands, but now its Reflecting Pool became home to a historically large algae bloom filled with jagged clumps of blue industrial paint. The Trump administration’s poorly executed renovation has already cost taxpayers more than $14 million, failing in just two weeks despite the president’s claim that it “could last for 100 years.” To fix the problem it created, the White House is having the pool emptied once again — draining the muck.
This is just the latest in a series of botched jobs in the nation’s capital. Last fall, Trump razed the East Wing to build a ballroom, which he said would be covered entirely by private donations. Instead, after lowballing the estimate, costs have soared to $600 million, and taxpayers have already had to foot more than half the bill. He undertook controversial overhauls of the Rose Garden — twice in five years — replacing the trees and lawn with a stone patio, cafe tables and yellow-striped umbrellas fashioned to look like Mar-a-Lago poolside. And he affixed his name to the Kennedy Center and planned to shutter it for a two-year remodeling, only to have a federal judge order his name removed and block the venue’s closure. No project is too big or too small to bungle.
Trump has approached the presidency as contractor in chief, treating D.C. as a real estate portfolio filled with properties to be flipped. Beyond the chance to stamp his name on America, these vanity projects offer Trump the opportunity to demonstrate competence. “I’m very good at building things and constructing things,” he beamed at the pool’s unveiling while a White House spokesperson declared that Trump “used his expertise to deliver exquisite upgrades.” Instead, the results reveal a pattern of overpromising and underdelivering for unsightly renovations unpopular with the public.
The tradition he’s struggling to execute is more than a century old. The City Beautiful movement swept the country from the 1890s to the 1920s, just as industrialization and urbanization moved more people from rural areas to cities. It employed a European aesthetic in American architecture and landscape design in hopes that beautification would make cities more livable and encourage economic prosperity and civic virtue. D.C. was the first to implement it: Memorials, boulevards, parks and white neoclassical buildings were planned to address its shoddy public spaces, summers reeking with foul air and a marsh that filled the city with a plague of mosquitoes.
The nation’s capital wasn’t always this way; D.C. was not built on a swamp. Aside from the idea of government corruption, the city’s reputation was the product of unpaved roads with muddy runoffs, riverbank construction that washed channel-clogging sediment downstream, and discarded waste and raw sewage accumulating in the tidal areas south of the White House. During the humid season, the resulting mudflats produced a stench so unbearable that Abraham Lincoln sought refuge miles away at the Soldiers’ Home. In the late 19th century, Congress authorized the Potomac River’s dredging to backfill and reclaim the wetlands that environmental mismanagement and neglect lost.
But now the swamp is back on the National Mall. The Lincoln Memorial and its Reflecting Pool were built to be more than monuments — they were the centerpiece of a reimagined City Beautiful capital meant to capture American ideals. Their architect, Henry Bacon, designed the pool to be a water mirror, and it was surfaced to maximize the reflections of the Lincoln Memorial and Washington Monument, as much a reminder of the nation’s exemplars as a place to consider the country. Today, however, the Trump administration’s botching of the pool renovation and other ongoing “improvement” projects simultaneously cloud Lincoln, Washington and the image of the United States at its milestone 250th anniversary. When it comes to Trump, draining the swamp means having to clean up the mess he’s made.
There are a few examples to choose from. Trump seeks credit for ending the war with Iran, reopening the Strait of Hormuz and stabilizing energy prices globally — all priority goals now because of the rash policy and bad judgment that led the White House to wage war in the first place. His weaponization of tariffs drove up costs for Americans through actions the Supreme Court deemed unconstitutional, and now the administration is dragging out the fight to return the money it collected. But these sorts of failures are less tangible than the botched renovation jobs around the city — public eyesores serving as visible reminders of ineptitude and money poured down the drain.
The U.S. will turn 250 in a few days, whether the capital city looks the part or not. Its swampy conditions were addressed long ago, but not to be outdone by history, the contractor in chief manufactured another one. Whether viewed as a metaphor for the state of the union or the consequence of executive mismanagement, the story remains the same: The swamp in D.C. is always man-made.
The post Trump might really drain the swamp appeared first on Washington Post.
