Plus, keep an eye out for our World Cup pun, intrigue around a tarp, and the Obama Presidential Center.
President Trump's efforts to spruce up the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool faced a snag this week, with algae turning the water green while rips appeared in an "American Flag Blue" surface picked by the president.
People are flocking to see the algae-streaked reflecting pool on the National Mall and are eager to weigh in on the solution.
The cost of a contract for work on the Lincoln Memorial’s Reflecting Pool has ballooned further — now costing taxpayers a total of $14.7 million — according to federal records. The federal contract with Atlantic Industrial Coatings is up more than $1.5 million from $13.1 million a month ago, a federal database showed as of Thursday.…
A Slate reviewer delivered a scathing verdict on Vice President JD Vance's new memoir, arguing the book accidentally revealed how much politics has "corrupted" its author."Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith" is Vance's first book since "Hillbilly Elegy" and was released Tuesday in what many read as a soft launch for a 2028 run. In a review published Thursday, Molly Olmstead wrote that the book is essentially two books crammed into one. For its first 177 pages, she wrote, it's a "thoughtful" meditation on trauma, fatherhood, and Vance's winding path from evangelical Christianity to atheism to Catholicism.Then, Olmstead argued, it falls apart. "From that point on, Communion, which came out on Tuesday, is a stiff and unimaginative political memoir. It deploys an eye-roll-worthy staff of straw men as it defends Trump’s policies," she wrote.The break comes right after Vance nods to his "evolution from Trump critic to Trump supporter" and pivots to defending the administration. Olmstead traced the divide to timing, noting much of the thoughtful first half appears to predate Vance's 2022 Senate run, with one passage lifted almost verbatim from a 2020 essay. She flagged a jarring later passage about Vance stockpiling ammunition over the "China virus" as the moment the tone sours. The book, she concluded, is a window into his devolution."The tragedy of Vance’s new book is that this split reminds you of who he used to be. It’s not only that he squandered a decent beginning, but that he revealed how far he has fallen from the thoughtful young man who once had something original to say," she wrote.She found the ending unnerving, citing Vance's wish to return America to a "Western Christian civilization" given he "just may be our future president."Olmstead's critique comes after The Wall Street Journal's Barton Swaim ripped the book for "egregious sloppiness," and readers buried it in one-star Goodreads reviews within hours.She concluded the book offers a "window into just how much the thoughtful boy in Hillbilly Elegy allowed himself to be corrupted by politics."
The Republican-controlled Senate Armed Services Committee has threatened to slash Secretary of War Pete Hegseth's travel budget unless he breaks his secrecy on various US bombings.
The Interior Department on Thursday touted the renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool by comparing algae to the Iranian navy. “The advanced nanobubbler technology very effectively killed the algae that has plagued every Lincoln Reflecting Pool reopening—most infamously [former President] Obama’s reopening—since 1922,” the department’s press team wrote on social platform X. “The Reflecting…
President Trump’s reflecting pool woes are growing. Days after the water in the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool turned green from algae, the recently applied blue paint is now peeling off the bottom of the pool. Clips are going viral of the new $14M paint on the Reflecting Pool peeling off just 12 days after the pool reopened. pic.twitter.com/4bX8v1jCfB— Headquarters (@HQNewsNow) June 18, 2026Meanwhile, the current algae bloom in the pool is the biggest amount recorded in the month of June in at least five years, according to The Washington Post. The president personally requested “American flag blue” paint in his $14 million renovation of the pool, which didn’t go through a required bidding process and was instead awarded to a company with no federal contracting experience who is overcharging the government. Any outdoor pool of untreated water is prone to growing algae, and crews were seen Tuesday dumping hydrogen peroxide into the water in a hasty attempt to kill the aquatic plant. There’s one problem with that: Hydrogen peroxide also serves as a paint remover. So in trying to (ineffectively) kill the algae, Trump also ruined his new paint job and created a potential hazard to local birds such as ducks. A close-up photograph of the pool workers’ equipment revealed that they were using a 12 percent hydrogen peroxide concentrate, which can cause problems if inhaled and burns if the chemical touches the skin, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.The Trump administration blames residual material in supply lines for the growing algae problem. The Interior Department, which is in charge of the pool, said it was using hydrogen peroxide and “high-tech nanobubble ozone technology” to treat the outbreak.But not only has the hydrogen peroxide failed to get rid of the algae, it has caused the blue paint to peel and raised phosphate levels in the pool “far higher than what is recommended to keep algae at bay,” according to CNN, which tested the pool’s water with the help of a swimming pool store. The whole project is now attracting attention for all of the wrong reasons, and it may look even worse than before by the time the America250 celebration takes place on July 4.