What the Reflecting Pool Reflects About America
Trump Derangement Syndrome in liquid form
Over the last two weeks, the reflecting pool at the Lincoln Memorial has been mentioned over 600 times in various news media outlets. During the same period, the Islamic terrorist massacres of Christians in Nigeria have only been mentioned around 40 times.
Why is the status of the algae in the reflecting pool more important than the lives of dozens of human beings? Part of the answer may lie in the inconvenient truth about who is doing the killing in Nigeria and who is being killed, but the other is Trump Derangement Syndrome in liquid form.
The renovation of the reflecting pool should be as apolitical as anything gets. Critical race theory has thus far failed to connect the reflecting pool to systemic racism (though no doubt if asked, its professors will claim that it was built by slaves), gender critical theory has nothing to say about the reflecting pool and ‘heteronormativity’ and the Marxists have failed to connect it to capitalism. Even the Hamas supporters have failed to show up waving their terrorist flags.
Unlike White House renovations and the battles over the renaming of the Lincoln Center, fixing the reflecting pool offers no specific benefits to Trump. And renovating it ought to have been a completely apolitical bipartisan issue with Democrats and Republicans agreeing to fix it up.
When the pool was previously renovated under Obama, Republicans did not jeer or complain even though the repairs proved woefully inadequate and shortly after the pool opened, it had to be closed again and cleaned of a massive algae outbreak that turned the whole pool green.
Republicans and conservatives did not view the algae outbreak as some sort of vindication and FOX News did not run minute-by-minute coverage of the color of the reflecting pool because they wanted a good, clean reflecting pool, and understood that a nearly century old pool was difficult to maintain, and that the challenges were not reflective of a particular administration.
That’s in sharp contrast to the media mania surrounding Trump’s renovation of the pool.
What the reflecting pool really reflects then is Trump Derangement Syndrome in its purest state. There is nothing to muck the waters with except the obsession with opposing anything that President Trump does simply because he’s doing it. And the fact that the media has provided more coverage to the reflecting pool than some regional wars shows what its base looks like.
The media is now filled with headline coverage from major media stories such as “What Color Is the Reflecting Pool? An Investigation” from The Atlantic, “Reflecting Pool woes: Trump administration turns to hydrogen peroxide in latest bid to beat back algae” from CNN, “Why the Washington DC Reflecting Pool became a global talking point” from the BBC and “What I Saw at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool Monday Afternoon” from the Wall Street Journal.
Two weeks of relentless media coverage of the reflecting pool reflects the fact that the media caters to a demographic that is obsessed with the most minute and petty score settling with Trump and that any story no matter how objectively unimportant can be blown up for its sake.
The media’s radical leftist turn has left it dependent on two demographics, the smallest one of leftists, and the larger one of older white liberals who are obsessed with social media narratives about Trump even while caring very little about the socialist policy agitprop that drives the Left.
It’s this latter demographic that pushes the media into orgies of idiocy that have to be seen to be believed. The Left wants to contend that Trump is a manifestion of heterocapitalist white supremacy, while the TDS’ers want stories about how Trump lies about his weight, has trouble walking down the stairs, drinks too much diet coke, raped everyone between New York and California, and how he ruined the reflecting pool. And since this is the demographic that keeps the New York Times, the Washington Post, MSNBC (MS NOW) and CNN afloat, the end result is not only a wildly biased media, but a fundamentally malicious and unserious one.
Jeering the renovation of the reflecting pool isn’t progressive: it’s the kind of thing done by those who no longer know the difference between defeating their political opponents and defeating America. Leftists hate Trump because they hate America while TDSers hate America because they hate Trump. It’s why polls show that this particular demographic answers that it’s not proud of America when Trump is in office, but has pride in America when Democrats take power.
The leftist hostility to America at least reflects a consistent philosophy while TDS is a kind of social contagion primarily manifesting among older white female liberals whose worldview is derived from social media and whose politics comes down to opposing anything Trump does.
That includes renovating the reflecting pool.
The Lincoln Memorial and the reflecting pool have arguably played more of a cultural role in liberal events with numerous rallies trying to recapture the spirit of MLK’s speech. Liberals should want to see the pool restored to its original reflective quality, ‘reflecting the heavens’ and the Washington Monument, testifying to George Washington’s role in envisioning reflecting pools in the local architecture, and providing a majestic setting for national events.
When liberals root for the restoration of the reflecting pool to fail, they’re telling on themselves.
The reflecting pool started life as a vision, but also as a way to drain the swamps of D.C. and capture the excess water. The difficulty in maintaining the massive pool has posed a challenge for over a century, but it’s also a testament to the idea that Washington D.C. could be cleaned up. Today, liberals seem to celebrate the idea that it has to stay dirty and jeer Trump for trying to clean up its crime problem, its filth and waste and the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool.
But the pool is also a promise. It offers us a chance to see America and some of its greatest landmarks as they should be. The pool can reflect the petty hatreds, the small-minded malice and miserable schadenfreude of Trump Derangement Syndrome or a bright American future.
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center’s Front Page Magazine.
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Read my book ‘Domestic Enemies: The Founding Fathers’ Fight Against the Left’ to discover the true origins of the American Left.