When historians probe our fraught period of American history, I’m sure they’ll decide that Trump’s reflecting pool disaster is the perfect metaphor for everything wrong with his administration. However, Esquire political columnist Charles P. Pierce went to go see the thing himself and found the scene surprisingly uplifting. Read his dispatch below. —Chris Hatler, deputy editor
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I went to see the president’s great, big failure myself, and it’s comedy gold.
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I had to see it for myself. The Reflecting Pool, currently d/b/a the National Driveway. Apparently, this thought also occurred to a number of my fellow tourists. There was a great spillover of gawkers from the Lincoln Memorial, taking pictures of the long, wide, blank expanse of what was supposed to be the reflection of the Washington Monument. After all, it's not often that you can see before you a perfect metaphor for an entire presidency. Destruction out of some dark whimsy and attended by a bodyguard of lies, as Churchill once put it. A no-bid contract for nothing. The National Driveway. The least he could do is tape off a 94 by 50 area, lay down some lines and a three-point arc. Put hoops at either end. And let the Urban Coalition League play its season there—outdoors, the way the Rucker does it in New York. It is evidence of heroic incompetence, of a delusional hubris, of a counterfeit expertise in all things, large and small. A very stable genius, always aimed steadily at the bottom of a dark ravine.
And the sight of it is funny as hell.
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You can go for fancy fragrances, sure. We write about the on-trend stuff, and we write about complex, ultra-high-end colognes. Give us the French names we can’t quite pronounce, the beautifully engraved glass bottles from designer houses, the notes list that reads like a poem with scents we’ve never smelt in real life so can’t officially ascertain if they are there or not. But when the Esquire editors sit down and look at our data on how men buy grooming products on the internet, one trend is glaringly clear: Most guys don’t drop several hundred dollars every time they want to smell nice.
Luckily, there are plenty of affordable men’s fragrance brands out there making good stuff—smart, well-blended scents that might not go toe-to-toe with our favorite noses, but they’ll give them a good scare. These scents will be more straightforward than what we’re usually recommending, but they all come in under $100. These are the affordable names to build out your fragrance wardrobe.
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It was early in Brazil and Norway’s round-of-16 battle in New Jersey when someone captured the entire World Cup in a single sentence. This was a couple weeks ago, when soccer fever had officially captured North America, with Norwegian fans wondering what the hell a BuzzBallz is and Mexico’s MerlÃn the Duck outright stealing hearts and running away with them. To my right were Norway fans, gearing up for yet another Viking Row, which somehow never got old. To my left? Legions of Brazil faithful, singing their way through the whole match.
Unlike, say, a 76ers game in Philly, where you have a nonzero chance of tripping into a verbal and/or physical confrontation near a Yuengling-soaked urinal, things just felt good. People were happy. The guy next to me turned around, unprompted, and said, “This is the closest we’ll ever get to world peace.”
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