The word “narcissist” comes from the Greek myth of Narcissus, which tells the story of a young man so enamored of his image in a reflecting pool that he is unable to look away. He eventually dies from his own egotism and turns into a flower.
Donald Trump is no doubt ignorant of this story, even as he loves to imagine himself connected to the glories of antiquity, so it’s fitting that he is reenacting the tale from Ovid’s poetry as a distorted, expensive farce. Like the mythical figure who gave name to Trump’s most prominent personality flaw, the president became fixated on the famous Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, hoping to repaint it so that it mirrored his imagined brilliance. Instead, the algae-ridden water has turned into an on-the-nose metaphor for his own decrepitude, as tourists have begun swarming it so they can mock this totem of Trump’s failures.
