The President Spent Ten Minutes on a Reflecting Pool He Kept Calling a Lake.

There is a particular kind of man who comes into the diner, orders a coffee, and then tells you, unprompted, every single thing about the pool he is putting in the backyard. The liner. The pump. The exact blue. You nod. You refill the cup. You let him finish, because the pool is the only thing that has gone right for him this year and you are not going to be the one to take it.

I did not expect the President of the United States to be that man at a Cabinet meeting. During a war.

The meeting.

Here is the setup. There is a shooting war with Iran. The ceasefire keeps getting violated. The negotiations, in the President’s own words, are running “on fumes.” The whole Cabinet is in the room, on national television, and there is real business to do.

The President spent about ten minutes of it talking about a pool.

Not a war pool. The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. The long rectangle of water between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument, the one in every photograph of every march in American history. He is resurfacing it. He wanted everybody to know how.

The details.

He said they cleaned it. He said they fumigated it. He said they hauled out “10 major truck, dumpsters of garbage.” He said they sandblasted it, and then, and I am quoting, they “pebble-blasted,” which he explained is “a bigger version of sand.”

Then the color. The pool, he said, will be covered in the most beautiful blue, very thick, “a very sophisticated form of rubber. No leaks. No problems.” The name of the blue, he told the Cabinet, the press, and the nation: “American flag blue.”

He wants it done by the Fourth of July.

One small thing.

In the middle of all this, the man could not remember what the thing is called. He called it the “reflecting lake.” He called it the “reflecting pond.” It is the Reflecting Pool. It has been the Reflecting Pool for over a hundred years. There is a sign.

A reflecting pool reflects the monument. That is the entire job of the pool. It is named for the one thing it does. And the President, mid-infomercial, in front of his whole Cabinet, reached for the name of the most photographed water in the country and came back with “pond.”

Hon, I am sure the pool is going to be a beautiful color. I just wish the man knew what it was called before he painted it.