Well, plenty of people think something filthy, dirty, and disgusting looking is representative of the country.

Imagine an art installation titled "America." It wouldn't have sparkling clear water bubbling cheerfully now, would it?

But I'm reading "Trump Says He’s Renovating ‘Filthy’ Reflecting Pool on the National Mall/The pool, which is more than 2,000 feet long, was the site of Martin Luther King Jr.’s 'I Have a Dream' speech and other events" (NYT)

“It’s filthy, dirty — the water’s disgusting looking,” Mr. Trump recalled a friend telling him. “It’s not representative of the country.”

Mr. Trump said he went to inspect the reflecting pool with members of the U.S. Secret Service and Doug Burgum, the interior secretary. He said one contractor proposed removing the pool’s granite and replacing it with stone as part of a three-year renovation that would cost $300 million.

“I said, ‘No, there’s a better way of doing it,’” Mr. Trump recalled. “I said, ‘What we’re going to do is I’m going to call all three of these people that have worked for me in the past doing swimming pools.” He said he told the contractors to “give me a good price,” and one agreed to do the job for $1.5 million to $2 million. 

He said the contractor began work two weeks ago and has “scrubbed” the surface of the pool.

“Now we have a nice, clean surface on which we’re putting an industrial grade swimming pool topping,” Mr. Trump said in a video on social media. “They said, ‘What color would you like, sir? It’s called American flag blue. I said, ‘That’s the color I want; I want American flag blue.’”

The huge discrepancy in cost comes, I assume, from using industrial grade swimming pool topping instead of replacing the existing granite with new granite (or other stone). That might strike some of us as trashy. It needs to be quite grand. It's not another swimming pool. And is that "American flag blue" going to be garish? Is it going to look quite different and consequently seem like an expression of Trump's personal taste. The pool has traditionally made people think about Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. Is that blue swimming-pool material going to force us all to think "Trump!"?

To be fair, the granite has always been a problem. It's not only expensive to re-do the pool with stone, it would probably begin a whole new century of the kind of leakage and settling that has plagued the pool since the 1920s.