The Brooklyn Rail

I spent time in Cambodia in 1996 working with de-mining teams and writing a little book about the devastating effects of landmines with the photographer Bobby Adams. Now, mines in the Strait of Hormuz have wreaked havoc on global trade. And it turns out that getting rid of those mines in the water is very much like getting rid of them on land. It’s a time-intensive, painstaking process relying on individual human de-miners (divers) to find the mines and blow them up. If you try to do it too quickly or skip steps, you get blown up.

In 1996, I wrote, “Mines recognize no cease-fire, no treaty, no change of governments. They send no representative to the peace talks. In military parlance, they are ‘blind weapons in relation to time.’”

Trump has been laying mines everywhere since he came into power. These mines will be going off for many years to come, causing death and destruction all across the world. One of his first acts in his second term, through DOGE, was to summarily shut down the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), which was set up by John F. Kennedy in 1961 to administer civilian foreign aid and development assistance and to promote democracy around the world while advancing US foreign policy and national security. On February 3, 2025, Elon Musk brag-tweeted, “We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper.” His violence left millions of people around the world without desperately needed food and medicine. A year ago, The Lancet estimated that Musk’s actions could lead to more than 14 million additional deaths by 2030, averaging more than 2.4 million deaths per year, including 4.5 million children younger than five years old.

This homicidal behavior on a massive scale came from the world’s richest man. A five percent tax on Elon Musk would refund all the cuts to USAID into the distant future and save the lives of millions of people.

Almost everything that Trump does happens in strangely complementary pairs, like reflecting pool repairs and the war in Iran. It turns out that reflecting pools were actually invented by the Iranians. These pools first appeared in the Iranian gardens of the Achaemenid Empire and were spread through Persian literature to Hellenistic gardens in Greece and the Ptolemies in Alexandria. The Achaemenid Empire, which commenced in 550 BC, grew to be the largest empire the world had ever known. Its capital was Babylon. Hegel called the Persians the “first Historical People.” The Persian gardens where the first reflecting pools appeared were called “paradise.” This was the word in Iran for the “enclosed spaces” of the gardens. The reflecting pools were intended to aid in contemplation and lead to a meditative state.

The reflecting pool that lies between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument was designed by the prominent Beaux-Arts architect Henry Bacon and was dedicated in 1922. It took Bacon eight years to build the Lincoln Memorial and the “water mirror” of the reflecting pool, that reflects both monuments, the shade trees on the sides, and the sky, bringing earth and sky together in the mind. The pool as Bacon built it worked well for the first 95 years.

When Barack Obama was elected President, the National Park Service set out to reconstruct the aging reflecting pool and spent a lot of time and money to do so, with mixed success. Always anxious to redo and replace anything that was touched by Obama, Trump announced that he was going to make the reflecting pool beautiful again. Also, as a practicing malignant narcissist, Trump was unconsciously and inexorably drawn to the reflecting pool. He drove his entire entourage over the pool when it was drained, to make his mark on it. Unfortunately, that mark turned out to be the mark of destruction. Trump then blamed leftist vandals for all the damages to the pool.

Trump’s fouling of the reflecting pool coincided with his initiation of an ill-fated war on Iran. Trump’s bête noire Barack Hussein Obama had put together a crack team of scientists, engineers, and diplomats who negotiated for two years to devise a plan to ensure that Iran would not be able to develop nuclear weapons, backed up by constant and meticulous monitoring and inspections. And he did it without killing thousands of people.

In contrast, Trump was goaded by Benjamin Netanyahu into massive military strikes on Iran, with no follow-up plan of any kind. Trump then sent his idiot son-in-law Jared Kushner and his golfing buddy Steve Witkoff to talk with the Iranians. The Iranians ate Kushner and Witkoff for lunch and had JD Vance for dessert.

Similarly, Trump awarded the no-bid contract for the reconstruction of the reflecting pool to a guy he knew who had done some work on the Trump National Golf Club in Virginia, and hired a neighbor of his in Florida to build a new water purification system for the pool. These results, as well, have not reflected well on Trump.

In Ovid’s myth of Narcissus and Echo, both figures are trapped in their own psychoses. When Narcissus was born, his father asked the soothsayer Tiresias if his son would live a long life, and Tiresias replied, “so long as he never knows himself.” For spurning Echo, Nemesis punished Narcissus by causing him to fall in love with his own reflection in a still pool of water, and waste away in his unrequited self-love.

Trump’s support from voters at home has been deteriorating rapidly over the last year, and he’s increasingly running over the mines that he himself has laid. All extreme narcissists harbor a self-destructive urge that eventually overwhelms them. Trump’s capacity for self-deception and ultimately self-destruction will be revealed in the end.