The Washington Post has a little sidebar item that tracks to top four stories on the homepage at any given moment. Currently the top story at the Post is about algae.
Why algae? Because this story is about algae ruining President Trump’s reflecting pool renovation. It’s titled “Reflecting Pool algae bloom is one of biggest recorded in years after $14M renovation.” The Post actually got a postdoc to use satellite images to confirm things are worse than ever.
Days after the completion this month of a $14 million renovation, the shallow water in the Lincoln Memorial’s Reflecting Pool had more algae in it than at any recorded point in the month of June for at least five years, according to a specialized analysis of satellite data.
President Donald Trump vowed in April to clean up what he called the “filthy” and “disgusting” water in the Reflecting Pool. He promised to resurface the basin to eliminate persistent leaking and to paint it “American flag blue.” Once the pool started to be refilled, on June 4, he praised its “clean, beautiful water.”…
At The Washington Post’s request, Alana Menendez, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Virginia’s Department of Environmental Sciences, analyzed light-reflectance data from a European satellite called Sentinel-2. The satellite captures clear images of the Reflecting Pool several times a month, and the data it produces can be used to estimate the presence of chlorophyll-a, a pigment found in algae.
Post readers don’t care about algae, but they do care about attacking Trump using whatever is at hand. In this case, the Washington Post has been trying to make this renovation into a problem for the president for two solid months. Two days after it was announced, back in April, the post ran a story titled “Trump’s changes to Reflecting Pool worry preservationists, locals.”
Some historic preservationists and other experts warned that Trump’s renovations could distort the experience for visitors. Charles A. Birnbaum, who heads the Cultural Landscape Foundation, an education and advocacy organization, noted that the neutral colors used for the pool’s basin were intended to convey greater depth and reflection that could now be threatened by the president’s changes.
“A blue-tinted basin risks reading more like a large lap pool than the solemn and hallowed visual and spatial connection between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial,” Birnbaum wrote in an email…
The project also provoked sharp reactions online, where social media users circulated AI-altered images of the pool to make it resemble a Trump resort and jabbed at Trump’s taste. Dan Silverman, the proprietor of PoPville, a website that covers Washington, invoked a lyric from a Joni Mitchell song that warns “you don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone.”
Probably not coincidentally, on the same day that article came out, there was another in the Post noting that Democrats were looking to use the Pool and other similar issues against Trump.
Democrats are building a large part of their midterm message around criticizing Trump for focusing on such pet projects rather than delivering on his campaign promises to bring down prices and stop foreign wars. A White House official said the president was celebrating beautifying the capital for the country’s 250th birthday.
In other words, Democrats care about these issues because they seem them as another way to attack Trump. And the Post did its best to keep the story about the Reflecting Pool going, just as it has with the story about the East Wing and the one about a remembrance arch. The only story they haven’t kept going is the one about Trump’s plan to bring crime in DC down. Why was that one dropped? Because it worked.
So when a nonprofit sued to stop the renovation, the Post had an article about that.
“The design intent, to create a reflective surface that is subordinate, is fundamental to the solemn and hallowed visual and spatial connection between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial,” said Charles A. Birnbaum, the group’s president and CEO, said in a statement. “A blue-tinted basin is more appropriate to a resort or theme park.”
Comments like that played right into online memes about the renovation which were also attempting to convince people the renovation would result in a bright blue color. Eventually the Post’s Style section ran a story titled “Did Trump pick the right blue for the Reflecting Pool? We asked a pool guy.” You had to get near the bottom of that story, through a lot of other criticism, to find out that the pool guy thought.
…blue is a color we associate with injury: Think of the mottled black and blue of a bruise. It is the color of authority and stereotypical masculinity; of depression, but also tranquility; of cleanliness; of cold; of winning first prize…
Just because American Flag Blue looks good on a flag, it doesn’t mean it will necessarily look good slathered on a length of more than 2,000 feet, says Jill Morton, a professional color consultant.
“The context of a color is what matters,” says Morton. “That dark blue, if it is that dark, oh man, that’s going to look very, very dismal.”
Finally, at the very end of the story they got to the pool guy who said it would be fine.
Steve Goodale, who goes by “Swimming Pool Steve” online, is Canadian, so he doesn’t have a vested interest in the state of our Reflecting Pool. He has some good news.
“It’s not really going to end up looking like a swimming pool,” says Swimming Pool Steve.
A dark swimming pool liner actually makes the water’s surface more mirrorlike, he says — which is why dark colors aren’t used often in swimming pools (It’s harder to see the bottom)…
It’s “going to very likely be a more sharp and accurate reflection versus the original gray color,” says Goodale. “What you’re going to see is a higher contrast to the light of the sky and clouds.”
And then, quick as a wink, the Post went from arguing the renovation might be terrible to, once it was done, arguing it made no difference.
The Reflecting Pool on the National Mall has been refilled following President Trump’s renovations.
The project ultimately took six weeks and cost more than $10 million, far more than Trump initially projected. https://t.co/no9QuP1lmu pic.twitter.com/jBPKbqtWIy
— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) June 9, 2026
The Post got a ton of blowback online over that, with myself and many others pointing out that their comparison was junk and the pool was clearly cleaner than it had been.
And that brings us to this week. There was a fresh bloom of algae at the pool, something that happens every summer when the weather gets warm. But this time the Post had a fresh line of attack. Trump had failed. Look at all that algae. And while the story itself is written like straight news, the comments from Post subscribers tell you pretty clearly who they are writing it for. Here’s the AI summary of the 2,200 comments:
The comments express strong criticism of Donald Trump’s handling of the Reflecting Pool renovation, using it as a metaphor for his presidency. Many commenters highlight the decision to paint the pool dark blue, which they argue exacerbated algae growth due to increased heat absorption. They criticize the no-bid contract awarded for the project and draw parallels between this situation and broader issues they associate with Trump’s administration, such as wasteful spending and incompetence. Some comments also mention conspiracy theories and blame-shifting to previous administrations. Overall, the comments reflect a negative view of Trump’s impact on both the Reflecting Pool and the country.
In short, nearly every comment is about Trump being a failure and the Reflecting Pool finally giving them the outcome they were hoping for all along. They are thrilled at this outcome because it’s a chance to dunk on Trump. Do they care about how Washington, DC looks on the 4th of July. They do not.
So here’s what comes next. The Trump administration will make a sincere effort to clean this up and, if they succeed, the Post will wait until the next time the algae blooms to run another article about another failure. And of course if they fail to clean it up then they’ll run that follow-up on July 4th. They can title that one “Red, White and Green” or something equally clever.
The bottom line is that Trump’s failures are good for business at the Post and his successes are only good for downplaying or dismissing as in that tweet above. Jeff Bezos has made an effort to change the Post for the better, getting rid of some of the resistance opinion writers, but he hasn’t succeed in changing the readership. The paper is what it always was, just a little smaller now after all the layoffs.
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