If there’s one thing the Trump administration excels at, it’s turning just about anything into a culture war issue.
One of the latest manufactured flashpoints has been the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool, or more specifically its color.
No longer shall it be a more natural greenish blue tint, which Trump has called “filthy” and “dirty.” Instead, he’s hellbent on making it “American flag blue” — yes, this is the same guy selling a Chinese smartphone stamped with a flag that only features 11 stripes — in a bid to make the pool “beautiful” again ahead of the country’s upcoming 250th birthday.
He started this renovation by painting the bottom of the pool blue, which rather than instilling patriotic feelings, evoked the appearance of a chlorine-drenched swimming pool.
Now, the renovation is running into a major hurdle: uncooperative algae. Part of Trump’s plan involved annihilating the green-hued photosynthesizers from the pool, but they’ve bloomed during the warm weather, multiplying out of control and sullying the cerulean that the renovators had worked so hard to achieve.
Workers are scrambling to get the situation under control. National Park Service employees used skimmers to drain the pool, and were later seen dumping bottles of hydrogen peroxide into it. A US Department of the Interior spokesperson said Friday that the agency would use “nanobubblers” to help with the cleanup, and though it doesn’t appear to have made a difference yet, the agency sounded adamant that it would pull through.
“The nanobubbler technology has successfully destroyed the algae bloom that has plagued every pool reopening since 1922,” a spokesperson told The Guardian on Tuesday, claiming it was “broken and disgusting” days after a project during Obama’s presidency.
“Now, due to deploying the advanced nanobubbler technology, the algae is dead and being vacuumed up as we speak,” the spokesperson added. “We thank President Trump for fixing the reflecting pool for good.”
Experts argue that they might be fighting a losing battle. Brooks Barrett, who studies marine plant life at the Smithsonian Institution, told Politico that there was “no quick fix” to the algae bloom in the pool.
“The reflecting pool is perfect for algae. If you were trying to biofarm algae, this would be the way to go,” Barrett added. “It’s warm, it’s stagnant, it’s perfect.”
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