What did Donald Trump do today?

He made his closing pitch for the 2026 midterms in front of a highly appropriate symbol of his presidency.

Trump has made himself the absolute center of attention in the 2026 midterm elections, and today he delivered his closing arguments in a place that both his critics and his dwindling supporters would probably agree was appropriate: the reflecting pool on the National Mall. Much of his lengthy remarks were about his other amateur renovation projects in the DC area: grass on the White House lawn, a new granite helipad, the "triumphal arch" he's trying to sell as a military sniper perch, golf course renovations, and the destruction of the White House for what he calls a "military top secret ballroom."

Even Republican strategists still friendly to Trump called the choice of topic "bizarre" and the "last thing" that Republican candidates needed from him in elections that are really competitive only because of his extraordinary unpopularity with Americans at the midpoint of his second term. 

Beginning in April, Trump became obsessed with spending tens of millions of taxpayer dollars on "emergency" no-bid contracts to have the granite surfaces of the reflecting pool in front of the Lincoln memorial coated in a dark blue polyurea coating. Problems were evident before the first coat was even fully applied, and when the pool was refilled, it immediately turned bright green with an algae bloom, and the coating began to peel off. 

 

Trump then began ranting, for weeks on end, about the existence of "criminals" and "vandals" who had supposedly caused the damage. This is and always was an obvious lie. No footage of the heavily surveilled National Mall shows anyone wading out into the center of the pool with box cutters, and certainly not cutting the hundred-yard-long gashes Trump insisted they'd cut. 

What actually happened is that Trump's hand-picked contractors, both of whom had ties to Trump through political donations or membership in his Mar-a-Lago club, botched a job for which they had no experience whatsoever. This isn't speculation: they have openly admitted it. 

The senior citizen and former Olympic medalist Trump had charged with felonies simply for touching a piece of the detached lining not only saw his charges dismissed for lack of evidence, but got them dismissed with prejudice, which means they can never be refiled. In a highly unusual step, the judge in the case said he was doing this to protect the defendant from further malicious prosecution by the Trump administration—and Trump promptly threatened exactly that while raging at his own US Attorney appointee, Jeanine Pirro, for her incompetence in finding him a scapegoat. 

The pool has finally been reopened after being covered by a massive privacy fence all summer that was erected to try to minimize the embarrassment to Trump—much like the scaffolding and tarp that still covers the spot on the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts facade where Trump's name was taken down by court order. 

Standing in front of its water, which appeared on a cloudy day the same slate gray color it had been before Trump's intervention, Trump once again insisted that the vandals only he could see were real.

Election Day in the United States is Tuesday, November 3.

Why does this matter?

• The reflecting pool debacle was a national embarrassment and wouldn't have been worth even a minute of a competent president's time. 

• Tens of millions of dollars to incompetent Trump cronies isn't a lot of money by the usual scale of Trump corruption, but it's still wrong.