What the Pool’s Reflecting
What Next | Daily News and Analysis
Slate Podcasts
4.3 • 2.4K Ratings
🗓️ 24 June 2026
⏱️ 27 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Most people probably don’t think about the reflecting pool on the National Mall much, but Donald Trump sure does. His efforts to cosmetically raise it to his standards have been staggeringly expensive, and ineffective in surprising ways. It encapsulates the Trump presidency experience pretty succinctly.
Guest: Christina Cauterucci, Slate senior writer
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Podcast production by Rob Gunther, Evan Campbell, Madeline Thames-Ducharme and Patrick Fort.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Over the last few weeks, Slate's Christina Cotarucci has been thinking about the reflecting |
| 0:11.5 | pool more than she has in years. |
| 0:15.0 | Christina lives in D.C. doesn't really go to the reflecting pool that much anymore. |
| 0:19.0 | It's kind of a tourist spot, but then President Trump made the reflecting pool that much anymore. It's kind of a tourist spot. But then President Trump |
| 0:22.2 | made the reflecting pool his personal project. First, Trump drained it. Then he painted it a color |
| 0:30.6 | he calls American flag blue. And then the algae showed up. But honestly, Christina's had questions before all that. |
| 0:40.0 | I mean, my first reaction was, is there something wrong with the reflecting pool? |
| 0:44.2 | It has always looked the same to me. |
| 0:46.7 | And I've never thought that something looked particularly off about it. |
| 0:51.9 | You mean, like, of course he's renovating the pool. |
| 0:56.1 | Exactly. Well, because he loves pools. He's, you know, he's the Mar-a-Lago guy. He's a pool guy. He loves painting things. He's very, |
| 1:01.6 | I did a piece recently about Trump's obsession with gold, and I found this anecdote about how he was |
| 1:06.5 | painting the balconies of Trump Tower in New York, gold. And he kept thinking that the shade of gold was wrong until finally he just pointed out a gold |
| 1:15.6 | Cadillac on the street and was like, that's the color gold I want. |
| 1:18.9 | And so the contractors had to go and buy, you know, Cadillac paint to paint all the balconies. |
| 1:23.4 | Like he has very particular aesthetic tastes. |
| 1:26.3 | And so it didn't really surprise me that he was fixated, you know, in the midst of the war in Iran and any number of other actually important national issues, he was focused on the color of this national monument. |
| 1:42.9 | As you perhaps have heard by now, it was not long before that bright blue paint began to peel off. |
| 1:49.4 | That meant you had scraps of American flag blue getting mixed up with the green goo that had started to build up. |
| 1:57.2 | Workers got deployed to suck up all this muck. Hydrogen peroxide was pumped in, and Christina |
| 2:03.7 | went down to check it all out. I did put my hand in there to like pick up a flake of the paint just to |
| 2:10.7 | kind of confirm for myself that it was happening. Okay, but you put your hand like through the algae. |
... |
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