Because he’s not a cable TV fixture, Washington Post arts and architecture critic Philip Kennicott can fly under the radar as one of the most unhinged sufferers of Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS). But stories like one that ran in Thursday’s print edition illustrated his TDS as he raged about Trump “disturb[ing]” the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, “one of the most serene places” in D.C. serving as “a balance between beauty and function” that now “doesn’t reflect well on democracy.” “At the Reflecting Pool, Trump turns a serene oasis into a police zone; The botched renovation and images of arrests strike at the heart of the president’s supposed reputation for competence,” read the online headline and subhead. Suddenly, the left and Washington denizens have decided the Reflecting Pool is the be all, end all symbol of the National Mall. As such, Kennicott declared that “[n]othing makes the scale of Washington more palpable than walking the length of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.” He further gushed “it doesn’t take much wind for the surface to begin to ripple and wink in the light” and been “one of the most serene places in Washington,” but no longer because of Trump. “It was anything but serene last week. Giant pumps disgorged a torrent of Shrek-green water, while tourists gawked, and authorities patrolled around the edges to prevent vandalism that, as of this writing, seemed to exist only in the mind of the man who made the whole mess, President Donald Trump,” he huffed. Because of all this, Kennicott made himself fit for a straitjacket about how somewhere “meant to amplify the ideals of democracy” was in trouble because of Trump’s desire for “an imaginary enemy.” “This doesn’t reflect well on democracy,” he seethed. The insufferable Postie claimed “there is always a balance between beauty and function” with architecture with “reflecting pools skew[ing] to pure beauty” and providing a “delight” in “the illusion that there are two buildings framed in the picture, the real one built on terra firma, and the watery one that may seem on several glances to be just as substantial.” Try and not have your eyes roll to the back of your head: “The doubling can be scattered with the faintest trace of wind. And in that there is poetic conceit of transience, a reminder that everything we build and make and do is fleeting.” But all that has been sullied with “arresting people for putting their hand in the water” being particularly “grotesque.” Kennicott declared yet another one of America’s “cherished institutions and beloved places” has been “alienat[ed]” from those outside of Trump’s orbit. He even sensed the mockery that’d come from this piece: “All of this might be funny, if it didn’t take up so much of the collective bandwidth.” Invoking the Lincoln Memorial to a veiled shot at Trump, he swooned that still is “full of promise and possibility…that perhaps humanity can rise above tawdry things like greed and cruelty and chaos.” Once again, try and not laugh at this seemingly poetic fluff that a philosophy-majoring stoner conceived at an overpriced Ivy League school (click “expand”): When the air is calm, particularly just after sunrise, and the pool offers its most pristine surface, the pool suggests another kind of power, and one too often dismissed or ignored. It is easy to disturb the surface of the water, which suggests one kind of agency. But we also have the power to leave it alone, to let it reflect back at us this fragile sense of perfect beauty. In that, there is perhaps an even more telling metaphor. So much depends, in life and in government, on the collective agreement to preserve and protect, to leave beautiful things alone if they are self-sufficient in their beauty. He threw one last direct jab: “It only takes one person immune to the magic to disturb the image. And Donald Trump knew a pool guy.” The next day, Kennicott’s Style section colleague Monica Hesse sarcastically wrote “[t]he best show on television or any other screen right now is Reflecting Pool,” name-checking CBS, EarthCam, Fox News, TikTok, YouTube, and “social media” writ large. “Reflecting Pool has everything. It’s a drama. It’s a farce. It’s a whodunit. It’s a murder mystery. The victims are ducks. Reflecting Pool is entertainingly low stakes because it is not, for example, a war,” she quipped. She later added: “To watch Reflecting Pool is to bear witness to both the behaviors of your government and of your fellow citizens. To see what they are willing to believe. Who they are willing to blame.” Exit question: If the press think it’s ludicrous for the President to be fixated on the Reflecting Pool, why is it that they’ve dumped hours of coverage on it and treated its state like a death in the family?