It’s Not Easy Being Green

Workers on the National Mall, desperate to turn the Reflecting Pool to President Trump’s preferred shade of blue, poured jug after jug of hydrogen peroxide into the water yesterday morning. As they did so, members of the National Guard, deployed to clean up crime, looked on. The water, at that moment, matched their mossy-green fatigues.The Reflecting Pool now evokes the joy of a Green Bay Packers victory. Or a high-school prank. Or St. Patrick’s Day in Chicago. It most certainly is not the gleaming American-flag blue that Trump’s repainting of the pool was supposed to produce. That project—the one that cost taxpayers at least $16.4 million and came with a nanobubbling system that promised to kill off algae growth—is hidden under 18 to 30 inches of swamp water dense with scraggly plumes of algae.“Yeah, it’s gross!” said one woman passing by.“Quite green,” remarked another.A woman visiting from Fort Worth, Texas, told me she just hopes it’s fixed in time for America’s 250th birthday, on July 4: “We came and expected it to be blue, and we’re like, What is all this green junk in there?”It’s a question that has ignited internet memes and conspiracy theories, posing the latest political Rorschach test to a divided nation. A not insignificant number of federal workers have now been mobilized to fight the green junk and answer questions about whether the green junk is under control. After the morning doses of hydrogen peroxide came the midday deployment of half a dozen National Park Service workers in bright-yellow vests, many with long-poled contraptions that they swept through the water. “Is that … a vacuum?” a passing man wondered aloud. Yes, he was told. It is a vacuum.By evening, the situation had escalated: Workers strapped on waders, grabbed handfuls of tubing, and got in the pool. Generators hummed; water pumped; workers scraped. By dusk, some areas—though by no means all—had transformed to a hopeful shade of teal. Aerial views, as some noted, made it look like a pa