The following is a lightly edited transcript of the June 23 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.Donald Trump is growing angrier over the strange saga involving his plan to renovate the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, which is beset with an algae problem and with peeling paint. In a series of posts, he’s raged at a journalist for reporting on it, fulminated that vandalism is the real problem, and hailed a series of arrests that have now taken place there, which are really bizarre and raise lots of unanswered questions.This whole sorry tale is taking on much broader significance than you might expect. It’s displaying many of the pathologies of this whole presidency and this broader moment in America—from the megalomania to the incompetence, to the corruption, to the sheer tinpot banana republic vibe that’s settled on our nation’s capital. Michael Tomasky, the editor of The New Republic, has a good new piece digging into the subtext of this saga, so we’re working through all of it with him today. Mike, good to have you back on.Michael Tomasky: Nice to be with you, Greg. Thanks.Sargent: So before we get to the discussion of the arrests, can you quickly sum up one point for us? You argue in your piece that the Reflecting Pool saga is a real presidential scandal. I wondered if you could just recap the story up until the arrests—how we kind of went from having the Reflecting Pool as we’ve always known it to having one full of algae and peeling paint.Tomasky: Sure. Well, I gather that it did need work, drainage work, and that part of it is legitimate. And something was done under Obama that did cost a lot more, $35 million, and it didn’t fix the problem the way it was supposed to. So that may be part of Trump’s motivation. But his real motivation is his vanity and getting something, putting his stamp on Washington in advance of the America 250 celebrations, but just in general, for time immemorial.So he puts his name on the Kennedy Center, he puts his name on the Institute for Peace, and of course tearing down the East Wing and putting up that ballroom without any permits, without any of the normal processes that are supposed to come into play when you do something like that to a landmark historic building. And the arch in front of the Arlington Cemetery.So here we are. I don’t know why it had to be blue. Nobody really understands quite why it had to be blue. These people did a swimming pool for him in Virginia that was blue and he liked it, so it suddenly needed to be blue. It’s been green for a century. And now it’s become this disaster with the no-bid contracts and the massive cost overrun. He started out talking about $1.7, $1.8 million. It’s now nudging up against $15 million.And he said it was going to take a week and now—where is it?—six weeks, two months, and it’s going to go on and on.Sargent: And where did the algae come from? Can you just kind of take us up to the present? And I feel like that’s such a richly symbolic thing. He’s the “Drain the Swamp” president. He was talking about making this thing crystal clear, right? Making the water crystal clear, transparent, as it were. And he’s utterly failed at that. Now, I don’t know to what degree that’s his fault. Nature’s a complex thing, in fairness to Donald Trump. But it just seems perfectly symbolic in a way that it’s now filled with this infestation.Tomasky: Totally symbolic. And am I a marine horticulturalist? No, I am not. But I know this much just from reading about this. Until those Obama renovations, the source of the water for the Reflecting Pool, which is 18 inches deep around the edges and as deep as 30 inches in the middle, was Washington, D.C.’s drinking water supply. Then it changed, so that the source of water was the tidal basin. The tidal basin is the smallish body of water—it’s about the size of a lake, for people who don’t know Washington—and it’s where the Jefferson Memorial sits and where the cherry blossom trees surround it. So the water comes from the tidal basin. So there’s algae. There’s algae in water that comes from nature. Go figure.Sargent: OK, so Trump is getting angrier about the situation. In the last few days, he’s tweeted about the arrests we’ve seen at the Reflecting Pool. As of Saturday night, we’ve seen five people arrested and charged with vandalism. A number of others issued citations, according to the reporting. But what’s going on here is really murky, as it were. One of those detained is saying he reached into the pool to feel a piece of the liner that had become detached from the pool bottom. Another person was detained after taking a piece of paint out of the water.Mike, these don’t seem like Antifa vandals to me. Do we know anything more than this?
