Presidential Daily Briefing: Top Issue—Color Green
Discussion Level: POTUS, VPOTUS, DSDP (Diet Soda Delivery Person)
Proposed Solution: Change the narrative
The memo arrived on a Tuesday, which Senator Marla Okonkwo always said was the worst day of the week to receive bad news, because you were too far from the weekend to feel any comfort in either direction.
It came printed on White House stationery, which meant someone had spent taxpayer money on the letterhead, the ink, the courier, and presumably the brain cell required to think of it. The subject line read: PATRIOTIC RENEWAL INITIATIVE — FLAG COLOR MODERNIZATION PROPOSAL (PHASE ONE), MAGA Making America Green Again.
Marla read it twice. Then she called her chief of staff.
“Gerald,” she said, “tell me I’m hallucinating.”
“You’re not,” Gerald said. “It’s real. The President announced it at the Mar-a-Lago Lawn and Fertilizer Expo twenty minutes ago. He held up a swatch. Said the evio-mentalists will love it.”
“Who? Never mind. He held up a swatch?”
“Algae green. He called it ‘the color of American vitality.’ He said red, white, and blue was, quote, ‘very French.'”
Marla set the memo down and looked out her Senate office window at the Mall, where the actual flag, the one with the actual colors, snapped in a warm June wind above the Washington Monument. She had taken an oath to defend the Constitution of the United States. Nobody had warned her it would also involve defending the Pantone color wheel.
“Schedule a press conference,” she said.
“Already done,” Gerald said. “Also, the algae industry has issued a statement of enthusiastic support.”
“Of course they have.”
President Donald Trump had been in office for fourteen months, and in that time he had proposed, among other things, replacing the national anthem with a jingle he’d written himself, renaming the Gulf of Mexico “Trump’s Basin,” before switching to Gulf of America, and establishing a federal bureau to investigate unflattering photographs. Most of these proposals had died somewhere between announcement and paperwork. This one felt different. This one had a swatch.
The press conference at the Capitol steps drew forty journalists and one man in a full colonial costume who showed up at every event regardless of subject matter. Marla stood at the podium and kept her voice level because her father had taught her that the angrier you are, the quieter you should get.
“The flag of the United States is not a brand,” she said. “It is not a logo. It cannot be updated like a software package or refreshed like a restaurant menu. The men and women who died under that flag did not die under a color scheme. They died under a symbol. And no President, regardless of his enthusiasm for aquatic plant life, has the unilateral authority to redesign it.”
A reporter from a cable network raised his hand. “Senator, the President says the blue in the current flag technically represents royalty, which is un-American. He says green represents the people.”
“The President also said hurricanes could be stopped with nuclear bombs,” Marla said. “He is not always right.”
The colonial costume man applauded. Nobody else did, but nobody needed to.
Back inside, Gerald met her with his tablet and that particular expression he wore when things had gotten worse while she was busy dealing with the original thing that was already bad.
“The White House released renderings,” he said, handing over the tablet.
The image showed the American flag with the blue canton replaced by a deep, swampy green. The stars remained white. The stripes were still red and white. It looked, Marla thought, like something a middle schooler might design in an art class the week before summer break.
“They’re calling it ‘the New Glory,'” Gerald said.
“What are the polls saying?”
“Thirty-one percent support it. Forty-four percent oppose it. Twenty-five percent have never thought about what color the flag is and seem genuinely surprised to be asked. Color-blind people are largely undecided.”
“And Congress?”
“Your side is unified against it. Their side is—” he paused, choosing the word carefully, “—processing.”
Processing meant they were checking which way the wind blew before deciding whether they’d loved the flag’s current colors their whole lives or had always thought blue was a little much.
Senator Doug Pratt of Alabama appeared on cable television that evening and said he’d always believed American colors should reflect American resources, and that while he personally preferred the green of soybean fields, he was open to the algae conversation. Senator Pratt had, three weeks earlier, delivered a floor speech praising the flag as “a sacred covenant between citizen and republic.” The clip was already circulating. Nobody who needed to be embarrassed by it was capable of embarrassment.
The constitutional question was actually straightforward. The U.S. Flag Code existed, congressional authority over national symbols was established, and no executive order could unilaterally redesign the flag any more than it could unilaterally redesign the Senate chamber. Marla’s legal team confirmed it in writing by Thursday morning, in a memo considerably shorter and more coherent than the one that had started all of this.
The difficulty was not legal. The difficulty was that the conversation was now happening at all. The difficulty was that somewhere in a suburb of Phoenix, a man was already sewing prototype New Glory flags in his garage and selling them on the internet for forty-two dollars apiece and had sold two hundred in the first day. The difficulty was that the algae industry had retained a lobbying firm, and the lobbying firm had drafted talking points describing algae green as “the color of hope, growth, and clean American waterways,” which was either ironic or audacious, depending on your familiarity with American waterways.
Marla called the Senate Majority Leader, a man named Chester Fain who had the face of a disappointed pharmacist and the political instincts of a very cautious badger.
“Chester, I need you to bring a resolution to the floor affirming the current flag design and congressional authority over national symbols.”
“Marla,” Fain said, in the tone of a man explaining rain to a child, “you know I can’t do that. Half my caucus is afraid to vote against anything the president proposes right now. It looks like opposition.”
“It is opposition. To changing the flag.”
“It looks political.”
“Chester, it is a flag. It has looked the same for sixty years. This is not a partisan issue.”
“Everything is a partisan issue,” Fain said, which was the most honest thing she’d ever heard him say.
She went around him. She drafted the resolution herself, gathered seventeen co-sponsors in a day and a half, and introduced it on the floor on a Friday afternoon when the chamber was half-empty and the news cycle was slow enough that people might actually pay attention to something that mattered.
She spoke for eleven minutes. She talked about her grandfather, who had served in Korea and kept a folded flag on his bureau until the day he died. She talked about the design history, the congressional acts, and the deliberate symbolism of the colors as defined not by royal tradition but by the Great Seal: white for purity, red for valor, and blue for vigilance and justice. She talked about the difference between a nation that argues about its values and a nation that sells its symbols to whoever currently has a swatch.
“We can disagree about everything,” she said. “That is, in fact, the point of this place. But some things hold us together not because we all agree on them but because we have all agreed to hold them. The flag is one of those things. The moment we make it negotiable, we have already lost something we will not get back by Tuesday.”
The resolution passed, sixty-one to thirty-nine. Fain voted for it because the wind had shifted, or because he’d checked the polls again, or because deep in whatever passed for his conscience there was a small stubborn thing that still believed in something.
The White House issued a statement saying the president had never intended the proposal as a formal executive action and had merely been exploring “creative dialogues around American identity.” This was technically untrue, since the memo had included a procurement request for new flag manufacturing standards, but the procurement request quietly disappeared from the record the way such things do.
The swatch was not mentioned again, until the President offered to sell authentic signed pieces in a speech from the Oval Office. He sold thirty-two.
In Mar-a-Largo, a man named Earl Thatch, who had bought two of the prototype New Glory flags from the internet, hung one in his garage and thought about it for a few days. He was not a political person. He had not voted in the last three elections. He owned a lawn care business and genuinely liked the color green and had thought, briefly, that here was something in politics that made sense to him.
He took the flag down on a Sunday. Folded it. Put it in a box in the corner of his garage, next to a pair of gold sneakers and a collection of extension cords whose purposes he had forgotten.
Then he went inside, where his daughter was doing homework at the kitchen table under a small framed print of the flag his wife had bought at a craft fair years ago, and he stood there looking at it for a moment, the red and the white and the blue, none of which matched anything in the room, which had always seemed right to him without him ever having thought about why.
He made two sandwiches and brought one to his daughter and did not think about politics for the rest of the day, which was, all things considered, a reasonable response to a world in which the flag had briefly almost been algae green and a senator from Ohio had needed to stand in a half-empty chamber on a Friday afternoon to explain why that was a problem.
Some victories are small and cost more than they should.
That is still a victory.
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