The Daily Blast: Trump Rages over Reflecting Pool Fiasco as Arrests over it Grow Darker

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"Elebe prämium Kaffee schon ab 29 Euro." "En Decke jetzt die Cuba-Kapselmaschine in deiner Chibufiale und auf Chibodee." "This is the Daily Blast from the New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I'm your host, Greg Sargent." "Dunnel Trump is growing angry, or 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, culminated that vandalism is the real problem, and hailed a series of arrests that have now taken place there,

which are really bizarre and raised 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 tin-pot banana republic vibe that settled on our nation's capital."

Michael Tmsky, 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. "Nice to be with you, Greg. Thanks."

“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. "Sure. Well, I gather that it did need work, drainage work, and that part of it is legitimate, and something was done under Obama. One of it 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 USA-250th anniversary celebrations, but just in general, you know, 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 form 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, you know, he said it was going to take a week, and now it's where is it six weeks, two months, and it's going to go on and on. 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 water crystal clear, transparent as it were. And he's utterly failed at that. Now I don't know to what degree that's as fault. Nature is a complex thing in fairness to Donald Trump, right? But it just seems perfectly symbolic in a way that it's now filled with this, with this

infestation totally symbolic. And I, you know, 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

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 smallest 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, you know, there's algae. There's algae in water that comes from nature. Go figure. Okay, so Trump is getting angrier about the situation. In the last few days, he's tweeted about the arrests.

We've seen that they were 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 antifabandals to me. Do we know anything more than this?

“And what does your gut tell you about what's really going on with these arrests?”

In the case of the first gentleman that's a guy named David Hurn.

I wrote about his saga in my piece today. And this got quite a lot of coverage over the weekend. He was out on a bike ride. He's a former U.S. Olympic athlete, a canoeist, a canoe racer. And he was out on a long bike ride.

I saw it described variously as 50 miles, 64 miles. I ride my bike sometimes on Saturdays to 15 as a good Saturday for me. A really good Saturday. So this guy, and he's he's 67 years old. So he's in some kind of shape and you know, he was an Olympic athlete.

I doubt he's spealing pieces. He said this piece of the rubberized liner was partially detached. And he reached into the reflecting pool just to see how it felt. And the next thing he knew, he said he was in handcuffs. He also had the misfortune of this right wing journalist named Emily Miller, who's gone back

and forth doing like one American news in the Washington Times and the local Fox over the years. Happened to be there, I guess, and videotaped him. And maybe showed it to Park Police or something like that. I don't know. It's all, as you say, it's all very opaque and, you know, why these people are being arrested, it's just not clear yet as far as I know, talking on Monday afternoon.

The Park Police and the Department of the Interior haven't commented on these arrests. Amazing. And CBS reports that one of the people arrested was the same individual who Trump accused and one of his tweets of using a knife to carve a 250 foot gash into the facade. Mike, 250 feet is nearly the length of a football field. And the choice of the 250 number, sure, sounds suspiciously like an echo of the 250th anniversary

that this reflecting pool is supposed to be a part of. So it sort of seems like baby that number was rattling around in Trump's head or something. Now, again, maybe someone did do this. I can't seem to find evidence of it, but it does it seem likely to you that someone would try to

“carve something that long into the facade, like a 250 foot long line?”

No, it doesn't seem likely, but you never know. I mean, I could believe that there are

people who aren't fans of Trump out there who might vandalize this thing because it's become such a simple to him. I can believe that. But if that's true, to tell us, chose the evidence, gives the names and tells what they did. I don't support people damaging federal government property, especially historic landmarks like that. I'm sure you don't either. I'm sure nobody listening to us does. If somebody did that, arrest them, charge them,

prosecute them, sick, genine, pirro on them. But, you know, show us the evidence first. And so, you know, when Trump tweets over the weekend about vandals, I'm sorry. You know, the man has been known to make things up from time to time. And so, we're going to regard that skeptically until there's evidence. I hate to interrupt this thrilling podcast, but we have some exciting news at the DSR Network.

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and decades now, many other animals in Deiner, Aldi North, Philiale. And weiter geht's, einfach lauschen und genießen, Aldi. Good luck for Aldi. So Trump is getting angry about the situation in a series of tweets on Friday. He tweeted that "lightweight ABC Reporter Jonathan Carl was seeing sticking his hand into the pool and trying to rip the rubber off of the surface." Those quote, "John Carl had merely been reporting on this

whole fiasco." Trump also raged that the quote "radical left lunatics, most likely

Democrats who have spent their lives trying to ruin this country." He basically said they were

more or less responsible for this thing in some sense. And then on Saturday, he tweeted that disgraceful vandalism has marred the project calling this an affront to George Washington and Abraham Lincoln while characterizing his handling of the whole thing as impeccably perfect, one more tweet on Monday, he said the only project of his that's been vandalized as the reflecting pool. And then he talked about the 300 foot long gash carved by vandals. So it's apparently

gotten 50 feet longer. Mike Trump really seems to be spiraling downwards with this stuff. What do you make of it? He really is. It's it's it's just such a perfect Trumpy obsession. It's it's a minor thing that to him is a very major thing because it's about it's about his self image, his self regard, his monstrous yet very fragile ego. All these all these things that he puts on display before us, the American people constantly every day about how he's going to destroy a civilization

about how ISIS doing a magnificent job, about how all his enemies belong in jail, about the personal vandetis that he's pursuing through the office of the presidency, which are totally inappropriate and complete impeachable offenses. All of these things are just about his ego again,

“which is huge as we all know. But what's important here is the fragility of it. And that's why he”

gets so defensive. And that's how a gash grows from 250 feet to 300 feet. The reflecting pool I believe is about 600 feet long. So if he if he ever posts that it was a 700 foot gash, then we'll know that that couldn't possibly happen. Unless maybe the person went up and back. So you know, this is this is just his psychodrama that is bananas. It's the same thing at work when we watch those cabinet meetings and they go around the cabinet table and they all have to offer praise

of him each more a few of them last, each saying, you know, no, you deserve two, no buffer, no three, no four Nobel prizes and two Pulitzer sir. You know, it's just a preposterous preposterous situation to be in a democratic country. And this is this is the point I'd like to make. This is the kind of thing that happens in dictatorships. It's not supposed to happen in a democratic country, in a democratic republic. We're not supposed to have this kind of leader who is so fragile

into what's going to happen with the east, eastern side of the White House. The give people input

into the renaming of a venerated cultural institution that's been here in the nation's capital for 60 years. The people are supposed to have input into these things. And they're supposed to go through processes. And yes, experts, the much reviled experts are supposed to be able to weigh in on this stuff. But Trump, of course, knows better than everybody. And that's just not that's not as small the democratic impulse or a way to go about doing things.

“Yeah, and I think your piece got at that really well. The larger importance of this whole thing.”

And I just want to flag for people what was really telling to me was the way Trump talked about

the project. I forget it which event it was. But he was essentially talking about the contractors on the project in almost precisely the same tone and with the same posture that he would of one of his own real estate projects. And I think that's the essence of this, which is that Donald Trump doesn't get on some very basic level that this stuff is not his. This is not an imperial capital. It is the capital of a republic. And as a result, he doesn't own this stuff. He is a steward

of an temporary steward. And as you say, there are processes. But in a way, this whole story shows somebody trying to dispense with that larger idea. Right. He wants to be the Tsar. That's probably the best historical analogy that we can come up with. I went to St. Peter's Bird once in June and it was like 50 degrees there anyway. And I walked around the Hermitage, which of course is beautiful and then, you know, magnificent and the art and all that stuff. But I also walked around

that place thinking, I asked my tour guide, I said, how many people lived here? And she said, six, you know, the Tsar is family. And it was as guilt edged in gold as the Oval Office now is.

“But that's how Trump thinks of himself. And that's what he wants to be. He wants to be a Tsar.”

And that's what all these things that he's trying to do to Washington prove. And it's really, it's very, very distasteful. And by the way, I only mentioned this very quickly and you just alluded to it. But we should spend a little bit more time dwelling on the no bid aspect of these contracts. I mean, that's sewer corruption. You know, that's just, that's just basic corruption 101. You can't do that. You can't let out no bid contracts. One of them was for one of them was ironically to a

place called Greenwater, which is really funny. That's that Nafaro guy from Ohio. Then the other one was the swimming pool people from Virginia, who did the pool at his golf club in Virginia. But these

were both no bid contracts. And one of the two, I think the first one, David Ferranthal,

the New York Times reported he's so good at this sort of thing, is charging a 20% profit margin into their contract when the normal profit margins on this kind of work for the federal government are 6 to 12%. But they're just padded and the guy's a donor of Trump's, a donor and a neighbor in Palm Beach. And he just padded it up to 20%. And got the contract without any bid any competitive bidding. That alone is an impeachable offense right there. Boom, there's just no question about it.

“I don't know what, if the Democrats take the house, what are they going to impeach him on?”

I mean, there's there's 46 possibilities. Right in your piece really made the point very well that if this were just an ordinary moment, that would be a huge scandal. But since we're in this really extraordinary moment, it isn't. I want to close on this thought, which kind of pulls all this together, I hope. One of the consistent things in the reporting here has been that many people are just stopping by their reflecting pool to look at the algae and the peeling paint

to almost marvel at the spectacle of it. And I really wonder if, and you did that too, right? Like you stopped by and marveled at the spectacle of it. And I think for a lot of people what they're actually marveling at is what Trump has done to our country, how all this didn't have to happen, how it's all just rooted in megalomania and incompetence and corruption and derangement.

symbolic importance to ordinary people in a way that we still haven't gotten our heads around. And I just wanted you to talk a little bit about that. The day I wrote my bike down there, I took a couple photographs of it, just from my own amusement. I posted one on Facebook and I said, well, it looks pretty green to me, something like that, something kind of handed. Okay, I post political-ish things on my Facebook feed from time to time. And it's interesting

because it's not my new Republic Readership. This is like old high school friends.

Many of whom are MAGA, many of whom have politics basically like mine. So it's a mix and I get to see a mix.

Usually when I post a political kind of thing on Facebook, 50 people, either give it a like or have some kind of comment, 70, 80 people. This was the last time I look 870 responses. I really do think it has that sort of importance for people. It really represents

“this presidency and what's happening to this country under this presidency, don't you think?”

Yeah, yeah, it really does. It's just, it's such an emotionally potent symbol for people. Most

people have been to Washington when they were in eighth grade or later they brought their families here.

And you're sitting there right in the shadow of the beautiful tasteful grand but not opulent or self-regarding memorial to our greatest president. And I mean Lincoln, the Washington monument is up the way, but it's a little farther away. Yeah, to our greatest president and to a very humble man and to a man who probably, you know, if he could come back, would say you built that for me? Why? Donald Trump will want something

three times that size. As indeed, the arch, it's not quite three times with the Lincoln Memorial, I think, is about 130 feet high at its peak and this arch is twice that. So yeah, this is, this is really important and it's why to conclude on a point that you often make in your writing and podcasting. This is why Democrats shouldn't just let this one slide and just talk about affordability or whatever. No, you can walk and chew gum Democrats,

talk about this stuff, people care. People really care about it and just to underscore the point one last time, I really wonder whether this sort of thing, you know, the tearing down of the east wing of the White House, the piles of rubble that are on everybody's phones all across the country, the kind of viral nature of this imagery, the viral nature of the imagery of the algae and the reflecting pool, I do wonder whether people are sort of in some deep sense reconsidering

Republicans, small are Republican governance and saying themselves, you know, that thing was

“pretty cool that we've lost. Do you think that's maybe going on like that? Do you think that's what's”

happening? I hope so. I don't know, but I hope so. 25% of the country is always going to support

him no matter what, maybe 30, maybe a little more. But I'd like to think that the people who's both are like yours in mind, but people who aren't terribly political have enough of a civic impulse running through them, that this bothers them and that even if they can't quite exactly articulate to themselves, why they know something about this isn't supposed, this isn't how stuff's supposed to go down in the United States of America. I think I think they do enough of them

anyway. Really well said, Michael Tomaski, it was a pleasure having you on, folks, if you want to read

“what Mike wrote about this and you should, the pieces up at tnr.com, it's called vandalism at the”

reflecting pool. Yes, it was committed by Donald Trump. Well said, Mike, thanks for coming on. Enjoyed it. Thanks for having me.

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