Trump’s fountain and reflecting pool beautification shows Democratic disarray is a choice

National Park Service crews turned on the spigot Thursday to begin filling the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, capping President Donald Trump’s citywide beautification initiative for Washington, D.C., in time for America’s 250th anniversary. The plan, which included the reopening of nine historic fountains across the city, is a reminder that the decrepit state of most Democratic-controlled cities is a choice, and that all that is needed is political will to make our cities beautiful again.

The restored fountains show how Washington is supposed to look when the nation treats its capital as a place worthy of care. At Columbus Plaza, outside Union Station, water is flowing again after 19 years, turning what had become a dingy graffiti and trash-strewn homeless encampment into a gleaming civic gateway. “I’ve never seen it like this. It’s so blue,” one longtime D.C. resident posted on social media. “It is bouncing off the white marble. I’ve never seen the marble this clean.”

The effect may be even more powerful at Meridian Hill Park, where the grand, formal cascade with 13 basins, modeled on the fountains of Italian villas, is flowing again for the first time in seven years. The water restores not just a fountain, but the atmosphere of one of the city’s most beautiful public spaces. “It’s not because he loves D.C. people, it’s because he wants to show off,” DC resident and no fan of Trump, Florence Navarro, told local news. “But thank you. This place is special for us. It feels so peaceful to be here in the shade, listening to the sound of the water, it’s just magical.”

The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool will reflect again for the first time since 2012, when President Barack Obama spent $34 million refurbishing the water before algae ruined it in a matter of weeks, and it had to be drained again. Trump has refurbished the pool for less than half that cost. We hope the fixes will last.

As impressive as Trump’s beautification of DC is, the capital is not the only city in the United States getting a clean this summer. FIFA has told 11 cities hosting World Cup games that they must abide by the organization’s “clean zones” rule, which requires two-mile-wide safe and clean areas around stadiums. Because of these demands, Atlanta cleared its largest downtown homeless encampment a mile from Mercedes-Benz Stadium.

Let’s not forget the makeover San Francisco gave itself in 2023 ahead of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit when Chinese Communist Party Chairman Xi Jinping came to visit. Not only did the city clear “priority homeless hot spots,” but it also shut down parts of the Tenderloin’s open-air drug market, and it pressure-washed graffiti and feces stains from sidewalks.

BLAME DEI FOR FAIRFAX’S CRAZY SCHOOL SCHEDULE

Democrats know how to beautify a city when they want to. It just requires the will to act. That is what makes squalor in Democratically-controlled downtowns so annoying. The fact that Democrats don’t clean their cities shows that chaos and decay are choices.

In 1962, then-Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote that the architecture of the nation’s capital “must provide visual testimony to the dignity, enterprise, vigor, and stability of the American Government.” That standard should not apply only when foreign dictators or international sports executives are watching. Cities should be orderly, beautiful, and safe every day. When Democrats allow downtowns to become dirty, dangerous, and demoralizing, they do more than damage their own reputations for governance, they also diminish the visible authority of the American republic itself.