Trump Plans to Rebuild the Reflecting Pool, the Very One Between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument, Along Which Forrest Gump Ran to Jenny and Around Which a Crowd of Two Hundred and Fifty Thousand Listened to Martin Luther King

I've probably built more than a hundred pools in various buildings. Over the years I've had three or four good pool guys. I took the best of the three

This is not a quotation from a developer's interview; these are the words of the President of the United States at a press briefing.

The pool was built in 1922 and has been an integral part of the architectural ensemble on the National Mall in Washington ever since. It was already reconstructed in 2012, but Trump said that had been unnecessary: in his view, it is enough to coat the bottom with a special compound in American flag blue, so that the American idea may once again shine with its former glory. The contractor, naturally, he chose personally.

Fedorych also shared the backstory: a friend came to visit from Germany, looked at the monument and said that the pool was dirty. "I heard you," and now it will be the same shade as the pools at the hotel.

Remember how Khrushchev rebuilt Moscow? An old, crooked and "inefficient" city, a thousand-year-old monument, was remade into a utilitarian huddle of functionalist boxes. But that barbarism had a purely ideological basis. Trump, by contrast, has brought to power the optics of an old, seasoned huckster: for him the difference between a national memorial and commercial real estate lies only in the rent