President Donald Trump has self-soothed from his growing algae problem by posting a deranged AI-generated meme to Truth Social.
Trump, who turned 80 on Sunday, posted a six-second video of himself filling up the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool with the tears of a woman who went viral for yelling in protest of his 2017 inauguration.
The Friday morning post came just as new aerial photos emerged showing how big a bust his $14 million repainting of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool really is, with copious green sludge already returning amid an algae bloom.
The pool holds about 6.5 million gallons of water across upward of 300,000 square feet. By Thursday, around half of the surface water remained green—not the “American flag blue” Trump has promised for months.
Trump’s pricey remodel of the historic D.C. site ballooned nearly tenfold from its original estimated cost of $1.8 million.
The project also took longer than expected, blowing past the one-week deadline and taking a total of two months, further calling into question whether the president’s increasingly more expensive White House ballroom project will actually be completed on time and within budget.
Adding to the controversy surrounding the reflecting pool is the fact that the company awarded a no-bid contract to complete water purification for the project, Greenwater Services, is owned by a trust led by John J. Cafaro, a two-time felon and Trump donor, reports The New York Times.
Cafaro, who has a mansion in Palm Beach near Mar-a-Lago, has donated more than $300,000 to political committees backing the president since 2016. Trump has previously called Cafaro a “fantastic” man, according to the Times.
Trump’s reflecting pool headache is sure to be a topic of discussion as Americans flock to Washington to celebrate the country’s 250th birthday early next month, where the green pool may well be visible for all to see.
The Washington Post reports that satellite imagery shows algae levels are higher this month than in any other June in the past five years.
National Park Service employees have spent the last week vacuuming the slime out of the pool and even pouring hydrogen peroxide into the basin in hopes of killing the bloom—something that does not appear to be working as effectively or quickly as they may have hoped.
An Interior Department spokesperson defended ongoing efforts to clean the pool—using something it described as nanobubble technology—in a statement to the Daily Beast. Perhaps predictably, that statement showered praise on Trump and took a shot at former President Barack Obama.
“The nanobubbler technology has successfully destroyed the algae bloom that has plagued every pool reopening since 1922, most infamously, the Obama pool reopening that resulted in massive algae clumps taking over the pool’s surface following years of construction that cost taxpayers millions upon millions, only to be broken and disgusting days later,” the spokesperson said.
The spokesperson continued, “Now, due to deploying the advanced nanobubbler technology, the algae is dead and being vacuumed up as we speak.”
