Into the Deep End

Apples, oranges, pools and buildings

In June of 1979, Jimmy Carter took reporters to the White House roof. In June of this year, Donald Trump took reporters through the roof. Not literally, of course, but one gropes for language to explain the unveiling in the Oval Office of a placard titled “Our pool is bigger than skyscrapers.”

Carter took the field trip to show reporters the newly installed solar panels. President Trump wanted them to reflect on something else: the reflecting pool. His herculean effort to repair the leaky pool was a project that in linear feet was larger than famous tall American buildings like the World Trade Center, notwithstanding that the pool is not a building.

Analogies do not have to be correct in all of their particulars to convey a point, but the thinness of the comparison between a horizontal vessel for water and vertical construction built for people, computers, doors and their knobs, is not the only flaw illustrated by the Dada romp of comparing a pool to a building. The larger concern is cognitive.

President Jimmy Carter on the White House roof, June 20, 1979

This matter takes up so much of the president’s mind that he thought it vital to stake the ground. To arrive at the pool-to-building revelation, tell his team about it, order them to produce the illustration, and then present it with a flourish as if it were a reasonable point about a reasonable thing worth lingering on during his first public appearance in a week, with the Iran ceasefire teetering.

Things have gone loopy.

Broadcast capture of the Oval Office presentation.

Presidents are allowed to have their side quests. To a point. The founders expected presidents to have big egos that go along with these personal obsessions. On July 19, 1787, the Constitutional convention debated whether the president should be allowed to seek reelection or be held to a single term. Delegate Gouverneur Morris of Pennsylvania warned that shutting the door would backfire. “The love of fame is the great spring to noble & illustrious actions,” he said. “Shut the Civil road to Glory & he may be compelled to seek it by the sword.” Deny ambition its legitimate channel and it does not evaporate; it goes looking for another channel. In Morris’s imagination that might mean holding on to the office by force.

The point was never to extinguish the ego. It was to harness it to the state. Lincoln, running for the Illinois legislature at twenty-three, put the harness on himself: “Every man is said to have his peculiar ambition. I have no other so great as that of being truly esteemed of my fellow men, by rendering myself worthy of their esteem.”

The founders feared a president who would make the office all about himself. Unharnessed to the duty of the office, the ambition doesn’t disappear. It just stops pulling for anyone but its owner. You have a horse in a hospital.

It gets a little tiresome to refer back to the founders all the time, but it is in celebration of their genius that this reflecting pool — which I might remind you is larger than buildings — is being fixed up in the first place.

Except that it isn’t. The 250th anniversary celebration has become about glorifying Donald Trump. The currency bearing his portrait, a White House lawn UFC match coinciding with his 80th birthday, the State fair — a wonderful idea now crumbled into a glorification of the chief executive. These, and the escalation into a gyre of self-referential posts, are the cosmetic version of the personality-driven Trump presidency. This week it turned substantive, as the Senate majority blocked the President’s one-point-eight-billion-dollar slush fund, designed in part to reward those who attacked the Capitol on January Sixth — during the peaceful transfer of power, the thing that 250 years ago few thought would work and that has, against the odds, become a model to the world.

And in a time of war and increased threats to American interests abroad and at home, the President made his housing-finance chief the acting Director of National Intelligence. The statute that created the job in 2004 requires “extensive national security expertise.” Bill Pulte’s expertise is having used a mortgage regulator to open files on the President’s enemies. The law asked for experience; the president answered with loyalty.

The reflecting pool is supposed to do one thing: stand still and hold the image of something taller than itself — the Lincoln Memorial at one end, the Washington Monument at the other — so a person at the right distance sees it twice. It reflects something larger than it is. A president who measures it against skyscrapers has the function exactly backwards. He wants the pool to be the monument.