Everyone Wants to Touch the Blue Coating in the Reflecting Pool

“Let’s go talk to the ducks,” John Hickenlooper, the Democratic senator from Colorado, said. It was midafternoon on a rainy Tuesday, and Hickenlooper’s colleagues in the Senate were trying, after multiple failed attempts, to invoke a war-powers resolution directing President Donald Trump to withdraw the nation’s armed forces from hostilities with Iran. Hickenlooper, though, was at the other end of the National Mall, walking along the Reflecting Pool with several staffers. The senator knelt at the edge of the water to warn a raft of seven ducks about an impending threat in their midst. That weekend, a duck’s carcass had been discovered floating in the pool, which had been blanketed in algae. “Ruuun! Don’t stay here,” Hickenlooper said, waving his arms. “Run for your lives. Run for freedom!”

Two other visitors chatted amiably with the senator as he yelled at the birds. Standing at another side of the pool, a staffer was pointing a professional camera at him. Hickenlooper turned to the two visitors. “You know we’re going to post that on video,” he said. “Is that O.K.?” The women moved out of frame. The ducks did not run.

In the past week, the Reflecting Pool, usually a backdrop to selfies and the Capitol’s dramas, has shifted to the foreground. After Trump spent close to fifteen million dollars in taxpayer funds on sandblasting and resurfacing the pool in “American Flag Blue,” the project was thwarted by algae, which turned the water a Mountain Dew shade of green. Then strips of the blue coating floated to the top of the water, and Trump accused “vandals” of slashing it. “They went in there with a knife,” he said from the Oval Office, adding that police had launched an investigation and arrested some individuals who were allegedly involved, though he did not release any names. But Trump’s critics saw only corruption and incompetence. Hickenlooper had taken time out of his day to make a video about it. “It’s going to say, ‘President Trump, this belongs to the American people, and yet the shame here belongs to you, and you should pay for the problems,’ ” he told me, in between takes.

For every landmark the President tinkers with, he seems to create an equal and opposite sight: an anti-monument. The U.S. Census Bureau defines the D.C. metropolitan area as the country’s seventh largest, but another truth is that the nation’s capital is a small town, where perceived encroachments are met with disbelief, open mockery, and knee-jerk resistance. With his stalled renovations, Trump may have given rise to a new kind of sightseeing, one animated not by reverence but by perverse curiosity.

Last December, the board of trustees at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts decided to rebrand the institution by having workers add “The Donald J. Trump and” on top of his predecessor’s name, on the front façade. The change was part of the President’s efforts to revitalize and fund-raise for the Center, which he claimed badly needed help. Months later, a federal judge ruled that this was illegal, and told the board to remove Trump’s name by June 12th, just before his eightieth birthday. Hundreds of visitors flocked to the building, which sits on the banks of the Potomac River, to see the name come down, and several live streams were set up. On the night of the deadline, Rina Paz, a seventy-year-old retired international financial adviser, was watching a performance by the National Symphony Orchestra.“I couldn’t even sit still,” she told me. “My daughter had the live cam in her purse.” When the symphony got to the last song of the program, she couldn’t bear the wait any longer. “I said, you know, ‘I can’t, I gotta go out there, I just gotta go out there.’ So we just left. The last song, we didn’t hear. ‘American in Paris,’ or whatever. I said, ‘I’ve heard that one enough.’ ”