Dr. James Peterson: The messiness of America’s drained-pool politics

Perhaps Washington’s Reflecting Pool should stay exactly as it is. Its mess reflects ours.

By Dr. James Peterson

The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool has become an unironic reflection of the current administration.

The Reflecting Pool is supposed to center the architecture of American democracy – the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial. These days, we all see an administration reflected back at itself: murky, expensive, badly managed, reflexively punitive and seemingly incapable of accepting responsibility for any of the mess it has made.

Maybe we should drain the pool. And maybe we should leave it that way.

The saga of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool would be funny if it weren’t such a perfect parable of MAGA politics in 2026. President Donald Trump made fixing the pool part of his campaign to remake Washington in advance of the nation’s 250th anniversary. The government ultimately committed more than $16 million to resurfacing and algae-control work through expedited, noncompetitive (no-bid) contracts. One of the companies brought in to address the algae problem is owned by a prominent Republican donor who has given hundreds of thousands of dollars to Trump-related political committees and reportedly considers the president a friend.

Then the algae came back. The coating failed. The pool leaked. And making the reflecting pool great again became what most MAGA projects become: an expensive public embarrassment. This was then capped off with a common Trumpian move. The administration took no accountability and instead found someone else to blame: Former U.S. Olympic canoeist David Hearn was charged with felony destruction of government property after being accused of damaging the newly renovated Reflecting Pool.

But the case began falling apart when evidence indicated that the damage was not the work of some nefarious vandal. Documents showed problems with the installation itself, and the National Park Service acknowledged that repairs would have been necessary regardless of Hearn’s actions. The Justice Department ultimately moved to dismiss the charges.

Think about that sequence. Government spends millions on a public project. The project fails. Rather than taking accountability for the failure, authorities find a citizen to prosecute for allegedly causing it. And when the evidence refuses to cooperate with the political narrative, the prosecutor who declines to continue pursuing a case unsupported by the facts becomes the target. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro could not manufacture evidence that didn’t exist. When Pirro dropped the charges, Trump lashed out at her publicly calling it a “terrible mistake.”

Sometimes government incompetence is government incompetence. Sometimes the mess belongs to the people who made it.

There is another reason the pool matters: the process that produced this mess is itself anti-democratic. A no-bid contract is not simply an administrative shortcut. It circumvents one of the mundane but essential mechanisms through which democratic government protects public goods: transparency, competition, scrutiny, and accountability in the expenditure of public money. The Reflecting Pool belongs to us. The money spent on it belongs to us. And yet the public was effectively removed from the process by which millions of public dollars were handed to a contractor with privileged access to the administration.

That is not an aberration. It is emblematic of the Trump-MAGA governing philosophy. Democracy depends not only on elections but on democratic instruments—rules, competitive processes, disclosure requirements, inspectors, ethics, independent agencies, and professional standards designed to prevent public institutions from becoming private patronage networks. Nepotism and grift are therefore more than questions of personal corruption. They are fundamentally undemocratic practices because they convert public power into private privilege. The public good becomes something to be divided among friends, family members, donors, loyalists, and cronies.

There is still a more important reason to reflect on this moment and the metaphors connected to this particular body of water. This is an opportune moment to revisit Heather McGhee’s extraordinary The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together. At the heart of McGhee’s book is one of the most powerful metaphors in contemporary American political thought: the drained public pool.

During the New Deal era and the decades that followed, American municipalities built grand public swimming pools. They were public goods in the most literal sense: built with public dollars, maintained by government and intended to provide ordinary families with recreation and respite. But many were segregated. When Black Americans demanded access to the public institutions their tax dollars also supported—and when courts and civil-rights laws increasingly required integration—some white communities made an astonishing choice.

They drained the pools. Across the country, communities abandoned, defunded or privatized public amenities rather than share them across the color line. McGhee uses that history to explain a much larger American pathology: racial resentment can become so powerful that people will surrender something beneficial to themselves rather than see that benefit extended to people they have been taught to regard as undeserving.

That is drained-pool politics. And we are swimming—or drowning—in it under the tyrannical boot of this administration. The genius of McGhee’s argument is that racism is not merely expensive because of what it costs its intended victims. Racism is expensive because of what it convinces its adherents to destroy. The pool disappears for everybody. Drained-pool politics begins with a deceptively simple question: Who do we imagine the public is?

When government benefits are imagined as primarily benefiting “deserving” white Americans, government investment can be celebrated. But when those same public goods become associated with Black people, immigrants, poor people, LGBTQ people, religious minorities or other groups positioned outside a narrow conception of “real America,” suddenly the government itself becomes the enemy.

This is why McGhee’s drained pool matters so much in the current political moment. The metaphor helps us understand that attacks on public institutions are not isolated policy disputes. They emerge from a zero-sum conception of citizenship: If they are getting something, you must be losing something. Trumpism has turned that zero-sum logic into a governing philosophy.

Across America, families are preparing to send children back to school. Parents are calculating the costs of backpacks, clothes, transportation, supplies and food. Teachers are once again spending their own money on classrooms. Families already living on thin margins are confronting the consequences of policies that increase costs while weakening the very public programs designed to cushion economic hardship. At the same time, the federal government can somehow find more than $16 million to rehabilitate a symbolic pool in the nation’s capital—and then, after the rehabilitation fails, prepare to repair it again.

That is a political choice. Every budget is. The question is never simply whether government will spend money. The question is for whom, on what, and toward what vision of society? We are living through a political era in which enormous public resources can be marshaled for spectacle while the legitimacy of spending public money on hungry children, health care, education and vulnerable families is relentlessly questioned.

We can afford the pool. We can afford to repair the pool. We can afford to repair the repair of the pool. But somehow, when a hungry child needs lunch, America suddenly discovers fiscal restraint. Drain the pool.

Let tourists stand before the Lincoln Memorial and see the imperfections of our political predicament. Put up a plaque. “This pool was drained in recognition of the American tradition of destroying public goods rather than extending the benefits of democracy to everyone.” Then, maybe an empty Reflecting Pool might finally reflect something important.

It might remind us that democracy is itself a public good. Public education is a public good. Health care is a public good. Clean water is a public good. Libraries, parks, transit, nutrition assistance and affordable universities are public goods. And the fundamental question confronting the United States is whether we still believe in a public at all.

Heather McGhee’s argument ultimately offers more than an indictment. She proposes an alternative to zero-sum politics: “the solidarity dividend” — the benefits we can obtain only when people work across racial and social divisions to secure things none of us can adequately provide for ourselves. Better schools. Cleaner air. Higher wages. Stronger communities. A functioning democracy.

That is the choice before us. We can continue draining the pool or we can recognize that the pool belongs to all of us. For now, though, perhaps Washington’s Reflecting Pool should stay exactly as it is. Its mess reflects ours.