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The Great Salt Lake has been a preoccupation and a growing concern around here for years now.

And you know why. The lake is shrinking dramatically. State leaders, lawmakers, conservation groups, even private donors have been trying to figure out how to get water back into the lake. It's a major story, but mostly it's been a loa

one, which is why people were caught off guard in February when President Trump sent out

a truth social post that said, make the Great Salt Lake great again. I mean, it's on brand,

but let's be honest, who thought Donald Trump was paying any attention to the Great Salt Lake, let alone its serious condition?

But there it was in the post.

President Trump saying it was, as he put it, very important to save the Great Salt Lake in Utah.

He called it an environmental hazard, said it was of tremendous interest to him.

And then a few weeks ago, Trump put a billion dollars in his budget request to Congress for the lake.

Now, what we know about all of this and how it unfolded goes back to February 21st during a governor's dinner at the White House.

Governor Cox managed to get some time with the president. It was scheduled for 15 minutes and it lasted more like 90. Cox said the president did most of the talking. They discussed a lot of things he said, college athletics, international trade. But the governor, of course, was focused on the lake. And he said, the president seemed interested. So that was on a Friday night. On Saturday, around noon,

Trump sent out the Truth Social Post. And the backstory to all of this, as you can tell,

is pretty layered, not one straight line, but a series of conversations all filtered and passed

along until they land with the president.

But the BYU collegeist Ben Abbott, who's been studying the Great Salt Lake and warning about its decline for years, told us this week that the story actually goes back even further than that White House meeting in February.

Around two years ago, Grow the Flow held a fundraiser here in Holiday, Utah, and I ended up sitting next to this guy, Mark Burnett.

He's the TV producer behind Survivor.

Fifth person voted out of Survivor Cagallion.

The voice.

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