Have Your Say

TDS gone mad.
Does it ever seem to you that Democrats must have an unlimited lawfare budget? Who is paying for all this litigation? They’d sue President Trump for stepping off the Rose Garden’s sidewalks. Yesterday, Politico reported, “Lawsuit seeks halt to Trump’s reflecting pool makeover.”
Our nation’s capital is a city of monuments, memorials, and progressive elites who spend their days searching for things to be outraged about. Usually, they are outraged about tax cuts, redistricting maps, or the fact that some Cabinet member or other was seen eating a Jimmy John’s sub sandwich in public.
But this week, the most pressing issue facing Democracy™ —the crisis that has driven Democrats into their latest state of legal frenzy— is the color of a puddle.
I refer here to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, which is essentially a very long, very shallow bathtub situated on the National Mall. For decades, the bottom of this pool has been painted a murky, depressing shade of gray decorated with algae, pond scum, and goose droppings. According to liberal’s latest lawsuit, the dark gray color is wonderful because it “creates the illusion of greater depth and a more profound reflection.”
In reality, it creates the illusion that you are looking into a drainage ditch in a Soviet industrial park. Call it communist chíc. But in Washington, if something is sufficiently bleak and bureaucratic, it is considered “historic,” and you are not allowed to mess with it.

🔥 Enter Donald John Trump. President Trump, as you may have noticed, is not a big fan of bleak and bureaucratic. He prefers loud and gold-plated. But since he could not gold-plate the Reflecting Pool without causing a massive shortage of bullion reserves, he settled for the next best thing: He ordered the National Park Service to drain the pool, scrub it clean, and paint the bottom bright blue. Specifically, and appropriately, a color his pool supply company called “American flag blue.”
To normal non TDS-afflicted humans, this sounds like a perfectly reasonable idea. If you have a giant pool of water in front of your favorite national monuments, you probably want it to look like water, rather than a concrete culvert filled with lukewarm gravy. Trump even took his motorcade through the drained pool to inspect the work, a detail the new lawsuit seemed particularly aggravated by. It was described as though the President was shouting at workers, “Make it bluer! I want it so blue that astronauts can see it from space!”
But it is 2026. You cannot just go around painting historic gray things blue. That is practically a war crime. Hence, the latest liberal litigation over monument decoration.
An NGO (of course) called the Cultural Landscape Foundation found a retired architect who claims to have suffered, and I am not making this up, an “aesthetic injury.” So he wants an immediate halt to the painting. An “aesthetic injury” is a legal term of art meaning “I looked at something and I didn’t like it, so now I am going to sue the Trump Administration.” The damage enters through the eyeballs and penetrates the victim’s frontal lobe, where political grudges are housed.
This is a very serious medical condition, often requiring years of therapy and expensive lawyers funded by USAID grants.

🔥 The lawsuit claimed that painting the pool blue will “fundamentally alter the visual and experiential character” of the National Mall. It complained, bitterly, that the new color will make the Reflecting Pool look like —and I am quoting the actual language from the complaint here— “a large swimming pool.”
My goodness! Not that! A pool of water looking like … a pool of water! Next thing you know, they’ll be complaining the White House is white, or filing for an injunction against scattering the wrong kind of grass seeds on the lawn outside the Oval Office.
The “preservationists” found a 1999 National Park Service report that explained (probably as an excuse) that the dingy, dark-gray color was an intentional part of the contemplative mindset the pool was intended to cultivate. You see, as you stand before the Lincoln Memorial, you are supposed to look down at the water and feel a profound sense of gray, bureaucratic solemnity. If you look down and see a cheerful, patriotic blue, you might accidentally experience a moment of joy, which is strictly prohibited on federal property.
The NGO’s lawsuit demands that the pool’s historic character be restored immediately. This means they want the government to spend more taxpayer money to scrape off the bright, clean American flag blue paint and replace it with the traditional, historically accurate shade of Ditchwater Gray. Or (and this is probably what they’re really hoping for) they asked the court to order a halt to the project and to freeze it in an unsightly mid-renovation state for the next two years while the case drags on.