President Donald Trump's campaign is beautifying Washington, DC, starting with the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. AP Photo/Rod Lamkey See more of our coverage in your search results.
Add The New York Post on Google Washington, DC’s newly refurbished Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool isn’t just reflecting the monuments at either end.
It’s mirroring President Donald Trump’s surprisingly sophisticated campaign to restore nothing less than America’s soul.
For years, the reflecting pool was an unsightly green algae-plagued mess, due to an Obama-era effort to make it more environmentally friendly.
As The Washington Post reported in 2012, algae was already blooming in it a week after its reopening.
“This is a direct consequence of the fact that this is a green project,” a National Parks Service spokesperson said at the time.
“The conditions are pretty good for algae, once it gets in there.”
And get in there it did, despite efforts to eradicate it.
The Obama redo also leaked — a lot. And it smelled bad.
Developer Trump took note of the “pool” part of “reflecting pool” and instead of calling in high-priced ecology experts, he called in . . . pool guys.
They lined the leaky basin with a compound used to seal, well, pools, tinted blue for color, and added a system to treat the water swimming-pool style.
Now the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument frame a lovely body of clear, clean water that doesn’t stink like a swamp.
And that’s just one part of Trump’s ongoing “Making the District of Columbia Safe and Beautiful” program, which has been methodically cleaning and repairing ornamental fountains throughout DC, some of which had been inoperative for decades.
The formerly graffiti-covered and trash-filled Columbus Plaza fountain outside Union Station is now gleaming and functioning, as are fountains in Lafayette Park, Meridian Hill Park and more.
Well, Trump is a developer, and he likes things pretty — but there’s more to it than that.
And that nowadays is a political project.
Making Americans proud of America used to be something that united the entire political establishment.
Civic education, national pride and historical commemoration were bipartisan efforts through the 1976 Bicentennial and beyond.
More recently, we’ve seen the removal or neglect of monuments, the decay of civic infrastructure and the replacement of traditionally uplifting neoclassical civic architecture with ugly modern buildings.
This wasn’t an accident: “Brutalism,” as a dominant architectural style, was a choice.
Gone were soaring columns, noble statuary depicting American heroes or abstract figures like Justice or Liberty, and welcoming spaces.
Instead we got modern architecture — which, as Tom Wolfe notes in his delightful book “From Bauhaus to Our House,” was quite literally designed to promote socialism.
Modern architects blamed bourgeois values for the horrors of World War II and wanted to promote socialist values instead.
They disdained “bourgeois” adornment and designed buildings to dwarf individuals, not uplift them.
As scholar James Scott points out, the French architect Le Corbusier, noted for his huge buildings amid vast sterile plazas, dedicated his book “The Radiant City” thus: “To Authority.”
But even the most socialist-minded modern architects at least wanted their works kept clean and functional.
The decline in maintenance, and for that matter in public order (which Trump has also worked to fix), has had the effect, if not the deliberate purpose, of demoralizing America’s citizens.
If public spaces are dirty and dangerous, it’s hard for people to build aspirations, or to feel empowered.
And of course the more accustomed we are to dirty and broken public spaces, the easier it is to divert maintenance money to graft.
(Although even leftist regimes know how to improve things when they want to — witness Gov. Gavin Newsom’s rapid San Francisco clean-up ahead of a visit by Chinese overlord Xi Jinping.)
First he’s making it clear that decline is a choice.
Blue cities aren’t pits because of inescapable social forces; they’re pits because the people in charge of them want them that way.
If you want to fix blue-city chaos and decay, you can — and he does.
Second, he’s telling Americans that America is something to be proud of, by making its capital city something to be proud of.
Instead of removing the symbols of our national identity and heritage, or letting them decline into sad shells of themselves, he’s restoring them.
Our history and our identity as a nation, he’s saying, are something to celebrate.
And lastly, of course, he’s doing his usual jiu-jitsu to the left.
Trump makes things nice; leftists reflexively complain about it.
And more voters are likely to be impressed with the improvements than with those do nothing but moan about them.
He knows that, and the leftists can’t help but take the bait.
So what does the reflecting pool reflect now?
The face of an America that’s changing — for the better.
Glenn Harlan Reynolds is a professor of law at the University of Tennessee and founder of the InstaPundit.com blog.
