Yesterday, CBS reported, “Trump says he’ll resurface the bottom of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, turning it blue.” The project, originally projected to take three years, has already started and will be done in a few weeks, well in time for the nation’s 250th anniversary celebrations.

The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool was originally built in the 1920’s. It stretches between the Lincoln Memorial and the World War II Memorial/Washington Monument along the National Mall. Its basin totals over 300,000 square feet and is over 2,000 feet long— the length of around twelve Olympic-sized swimming pools stacked end-to-end.

The Reflecting Pool has prompted a great deal of reflection. In 2012, Obama spent $34 million to “renovate” the pool, and the before-and-after distinction was so stark it required scientific instruments to detect. Visitors often describe the water as green, sludgy, and filled with algae. One August 2024 Yelp review noted the pool had “very little water,” and what water it did have was “green, brackish, and emanates a not exactly edifying smell,” with ducks walking rather than swimming. Another 2024 review mentioned being “surprised to see how dirty it was; cigarette butts, food wrappers, algae, etc.”

President Trump decided to fix it and described his plan during this week’s Oval Office event about TrumpRx, in a classic Trump topical diversion. “It’s filthy, dirty—the water looks disgusting,” the President said, adding that, “it leaks like a sieve.” In short: “It doesn’t represent our nation.” He described asking a government contractor for a quote to properly repair the pool. They quoted $300 million and three years of construction.

The President smelled an overpriced rat. So he called some of the pool guys he used back in the day when he was building hotels and asked for a “fair price.” He told them to treat it like it was a very big swimming pool. The result: a $1-2 million quote, a 40 to 50-year lifespan, and a forecast of one week. They asked for his surface color preference, suggesting “American flag blue,” and Trump immediately accepted. “It will look more beautiful than when they built it in 1922, much more beautiful,” he said.

In November, President Trump posted a “before” video on his Truth Social feed captioned “Make the Capitol Beautiful Again,” and told us to “bookmark it.” Well, here it is, in time for both the Washington, DC, anniversary celebration and the midterm elections. But that wasn’t nearly all the beautifying.

Earlier this month, BusinessWeek ran a story that reported: “President Donald Trump is reshaping Washington, DC, from the White House to federal buildings.” A few examples include the Reflecting Pool, the new East Wing ballroom, building renaming, proposed new monuments, the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, and the most recent example, the Lafayette Park fountain, which is nearly complete.

The twin Lafayette Park fountains are ornamental, circular basins set in the lawn panels east and west of Andrew Jackson’s statue in Lafayette Park, directly north of the White House across Pennsylvania Avenue. They had fallen into disrepair and stood bone-dry for several years (2021–2024) before the Trump Administration prioritized bringing them back online.

The fountains flank one of the strangest visual juxtapositions in Washington: a flamboyant equestrian statue of Andrew Jackson on a horse balancing only on its hind legs—the first of its kind in the world—surrounded by calm lawns and modest fountains. (Historical note: the statue’s 1853 artist, Clark Mills, had never seen an equestrian statue before. He worked with horse cadavers and his own stallion —named Olympus— to figure out the balance. At the dedication, he threw his own body against the front legs to prove it wouldn’t fall.)

Earlier this year, the National Park Service began a major rehabilitation of Lafayette Park that includes repairing the historic fountains, installing new pumping systems and underground vaults, and upgrading irrigation, turf, benches, and hardscaping. This week, the fountains were turned back on—for the first time since the Cabbage infested the White House—with water running even as the surrounding construction continues. It is a liquid metaphor for how history continues drowning the Biden Era and how the waters of freedom are flowing again.

🔥 Beauty in a national capital is not a luxury. It is one of the ways a people tells the truth about itself without words. Monuments, fountains, gardens, and even the everyday facades of bureaucratic buildings all form a kind of civic mirror, reflecting back what a nation believes is worthy of honor and what future it imagines.

When visitors walk onto the Mall or look across Lafayette Park at the White House, they aren’t just seeing stone and water; they are seeing a visual argument about order, permanence, and aspiration. Capitals that neglect beauty tend to feel provisional and brittle, as if their institutions expect not to be loved or remembered. Capitals that cultivate it, by contrast, invite citizens into an emotional relationship with their own country.

Trump’s second-term “beautification” drive in Washington is a visible demarcation line between eras. It doesn’t just tweak décor; it is aggressively rewriting the capital’s aesthetic script. Previous presidents largely operated within a shared vocabulary of incremental restoration: tune up a garden, repair a façade, maybe add a sculpture here or there— but always as careful custodians of inherited symbolism.

Trump the Builder, by contrast, has treated Washington as a personal construction project: a $400 million White House ballroom, a paved and rebranded “Rose Garden Club,” towering banners on federal facades, a triumphal arch proposal, and a campaign to repaint, relight, or recolor everything from fountains to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. It is a shift from stewardship to authorship.

That is why the current wave of projects, like turning dead fountains back on in Lafayette Park and across the District, functions as a bright line in time, a cultural demarcation point. On one side is the Capital’s long post-Cold-War decline, a gradual relaxation into the aesthetics of battered homeless citizens, garbage mountains, broken infrastructure, security fences, police tape, ugly stained building facades, and piles of goose droppings.

It was a long, disappointing story of pessimism and a slow surrender to the forces of entropy.

But now, we are on the other side. We are building a newly energized, humanized, personalized capital, where beauty is mobilized as a uniquely American brand: giant arches, flag‑colored pools, and ballroom-scaled entertaining spaces that tie the look of the city more tightly to a positive, optimistic identity, a new birth of freedom, growth, development, and adventure.

I wonder how future historians will evaluate all the Democrats’ lawsuits to stop this in its tracks. Not well, I hope. Why any American would want to keep our capital in perpetual decline is a question that invites a very serious and troubling answer.

Kudos to President Trump and all his beautification projects. America is grateful.