First Draft – 🌿 🦠 ‘Kill All the F*cking Algae’: Trump’s Failed DC Pyongyang-ification Is Driving Him Insane
The president's sunken mind can't get out of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool he wants so badly to renovate – unless it's time for him to make life miserable for Republicans on Capitol Hill.
On this day in 1876, Native Americans led by Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull wiped out U.S. forces under Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in southern Montana, the greatest Native American victory over the U.S. Army.
Happy Thursday, everybody. It’s Swin again. As we’ve been reporting for months at Zeteo, Donald Trump and his Republican Party have been marshaling a gargantuan sum of YOUR money – in the billions! – for initiatives designed to feed his vanity and perpetuate his cult of personality. It’s one of the more disturbing aspects of an infernally authoritarian time, the kind of thing we lied about to ourselves for decades, insisting it can’t happen here. And yet the president and his gang of thieves and reprobates are so clumsy that it’s hard not to laugh at them, even as they try to arrest you for laughing at them.
In today’s ‘First Draft,’ we dive back into Trump and the GOP’s bungled Pyongyang-ification of our capital, and how it underscores the limits of his reign of terror. Plus, Trump stokes more Capitol Hill chaos, and he stokes a shouting match with a GOP senator, while shivving his own party over a bipartisan housing bill.
‘He Just Wants to Get Back to the Pool…’
On the night of June 17, I made a joke on Bluesky that Donald Trump “needs this war to end” so he “can stop worrying about war on Iran and get back to his main priority of war on Reflecting Pool.” Because the second Trump era defies all satire, an hour later, the Interior Department began comparing efforts to combat “the dead algae” plaguing the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool to Trump’s war on Iran.
The Reflecting Pool saga, now escalated to the White House imposing a mini-police-state around the pool while accused of killing ducks, is nothing if not emblematic of the Maddest-Emperor phase of Trump’s Mad Emperor presidency. He and several departments are siphoning a ton of public money, time, and resources into a vanity project. Now the project is over-budget and devolving into a mortifying self-inflicted spectacle, the president is having armed agents – and literal U.S. troops – patrol the area. Trump is bragging about how many people have been arrested or cited for disrespecting his pool, and much of the U.S. government is spreading Trump’s lie that “vandals” caused the damage that his own “renovation” has in fact wrought. The president is also threatening to sue media outlets that piss him off about the pool. And in keeping with the broader traditions of the Trump-Vance administration, they can’t even manage to pull off this small disaster without seeming suspiciously corrupt.
The Trump presidency is full of perfect metaphors for the depravity and self-defeating failures of the ruling party’s policies. For instance, Trump’s military birthday parade in DC last year was a visual representation of the blundering limitations of his fascist personality cult, and another sign that his administration can’t do anything big or small without doing it “illegally.” Now Trump’s hyper-fixation on the reflecting pool – including his expensive, boneheaded inability to fix it and his demands for a cover-up of yet another humiliation – stands tall among painfully on-the-nose metaphors for the horror he and his party are causing and the wars they’re losing.
It has everything: flop-sweat incompetence, state-sponsored militarized crackdown, sinister but eminently laughable cultishness, deaths, and North-Korean-regime-style deception and propaganda. (That is perhaps unfair to the North Koreans, who often exercise a far greater level of message discipline than the current U.S. government.)
And it’s not just the reflecting pool! As Prem reported for Zeteo in March, the president is attempting to turn the very anti-Trump capital into his own bumbling imitation of Pyongyang, where his face, name, and MAGA hero-worship loom large, whether residents like it or not. From the Lincoln Memorial to the Kennedy Center, Trump’s efforts to rebrand the city in his image aren’t just stalling. They’re showing the limits of his authoritarian power grabs.
Earlier this month, the Kennedy Center board (which Trump stacked with loyalists) was forced to comply with a federal judge’s order to remove Trump’s name from the facade and from distributed materials. Sources who’ve spoken to Trump say he insists his name “will be back” on the building, perhaps with material harder for workers to pry off. He’s wondered aloud to confidants why the board hasn’t stacked the Kennedy Center’s general counsel’s office, which complied with the judge’s order, with “better lawyers.”
Elsewhere in DC, Trump and his allies appear incapable of doing something as basic as organizing a music festival without the whole thing falling apart.
The failures of these efforts seem to be driving Trump slowly (more) insane. Sources close to the president note an unsettling – if quintessentially Trumpian – degree of obsession and rage over the fiascos plaguing his time as decorator-in-chief, especially when it comes to his precious pool.
In the past week, the Interior Department and other offices have devoted much of their social media output to screeching at the media for reporting on the debacle, or to warning so-called “criminals” that they’ll be punished if caught tormenting the pool. (Never mind that Trump himself had SUVs driven over the pool bottom in May, after it had been repainted, leaving tire tracks in one patch that was still wet, and lingering questions about the cause of the “350-ft. gash” Trump has ranted about.)
This communications strategy comes from a top-down approach. People with knowledge of the matter, in and close to the federal government, tell me Trump has demanded, and is receiving, up-to-the-minute updates on the reflecting pool. He’s given spoken and in some cases written directives, including a very succinct: “Kill all the fucking algae.” He’s fumed at the media coverage, and in days past, he’s given conflicting, rapidly changing orders of what bald-faced lies to parade. The sources tell me Trump is personally directing this crisis-comms dumpster fire, and sending some of his most senior officials out to debase themselves by protecting the honor of his paint-peeling, algae-infested, hydrogen peroxide-filled, allegedly duck-murdering pool. (Multiple officials told me that I can’t prove Trump killed those ducks. “They could have died from anything,” one Trump appointee tells me. I’m as upset as you are that none of that could get put on the record.)
Earlier this month, the White House commanded the federal apparatus to issue statements chiding the media for “fake” news, insisting the reflecting pool was beautiful and Trump could do no wrong – only to have the president flip the script and finally acknowledge that, yes, the pool looks like shit, but it’s all the fault of those “vandals.” The vandals appear to be completely imaginary, but that’s not stopping the administration and its allies from squawking about it, all to shield Trump’s ego.
The president is doing all of this at a time when he’s supposed to be ending a war that he started and then swiftly lost in the Middle East.
“He just wants to get back to the pool and America 250, and making America great again,” one White House official says.
So, what say you, America? Feeling great yet?
🇮🇷 Iran War Updates
Senate fallout: GOP tensions over Tuesday’s Senate war powers resolution burst into view at lunch with the president on Capitol Hill. Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy said he presented his concerns about the war. Donald Trump attacked him and also Senator Dave McCormick for missing the key vote. The Pennsylvanian had been at an event in his state – with Trump.
Big talk: Regarding talks to end the war, Trump told reporters the U.S. was “winning by a lot” with Iran “making very big concessions.” In Kuwait, Secretary of State Marco Rubio sought to reassure Arab nations, saying: “We’re not going to do anything that undermines the security of… longstanding allies in the region.”
NATO meeting: Sitting with Secretary General Mark Rutte at the White House, Trump complained about member nations not helping with his war. True to form, Rutte buttered Trump up, as “the leader of the free world,” who he said was doing “important” things in regard to Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
Strait talk: With the Strait of Hormuz open, oil prices fell to their lowest levels since the start of the war. Rubio said the U.S. opposed Iran’s plan to charge tolls.
‘Permission to operate’: A senior Israeli official said the Trump administration was placing “restrictions” on Israeli operations in Lebanon. Israel, however, said it would not withdraw from areas where fighting continued despite a notional ceasefire. Iranian Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf said, “An end to the war in Lebanon is as important as an end to the war in Iran.”
Mad King ‘Mad as a Murder Hornet,’ Again
Donald Trump went to Capitol Hill on Wednesday for lunch with Republican senators. His White House shit show came with him. The result was a legislative win marred by a shouting match over his illegal Iran war, and a chat to reporters so strained it seemed Senate leader John Thune was about to burst out of his collar, so clenched were his teeth and his jaw.
“We like our leader,” Trump said. “We like everybody really in the room – I don’t like a few people, but that’s OK, I think you know who they are.”
Bill Cassidy, whose Louisiana seat Trump took away, described his clash with the president:
‘You have not told the American people what’s going on. It was supposed to last four weeks. It’s lasted four months. Original objectives have not been achieved, and I want to know what’s going on.’ He did not particularly care for my comments. He raised his voice. I lost my temper. That’s not appropriate. It’s the Irish in me. But I again matched his tone and his volume and it went back and forth.
Trump was mad – “as a murder hornet,” said Senator John Kennedy – about the war powers resolution the Senate passed Tuesday, meaning both chambers have told the president to end his war or seek authorization. What happens next is untested, but the Senate delivered a huge rebuke, 50-48. Two Republicans didn’t vote. Mitch McConnell is sick. Dave McCormick was in his home state, Pennsylvania. He was with Trump for a swing-seat event, but that didn’t stop Trump from attacking him.
Incredibly, that wasn’t the most ludicrous bit of Trump’s day. Before lunch, House Speaker Mike Johnson and other top GOP figures spoke in celebration of a housing bill, a rare bipartisan measure that would keep Wall Street from buying up single-family homes – supposedly a Trump priority. But Trump suddenly said he would not sign the bill as planned. His reason: Senate Republicans won’t tear up the rules to pass the SAVE Act, a crock of nonsense about so-called voter fraud Trump thinks will save the GOP in November.
A rare boost for ordinary Americans, plunged into farce. We are ruled by a mad moron king.
🗞️ What You Need to Know
National mauled: Banners appeared on the Interior Department, showing George Washington as “America’s First” and Donald Trump under his slogan, “America First.” Washington looked pained. On the National Mall, Trump gave a rally-style speech on the opening night of his “Freedom 250” run of events. Guess what: he ranted about the supposed vandalism of his disastrous reflecting pool renovation.
NY state of mind: House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries, a New Yorker, and other senior Dems gave a cool reception to primary wins in the city for three left-wingers endorsed by Zohran Mamdani. Jeffries said, with some misplaced condescension, the mayor had “work to do in terms of the conversations that he’s going to have with members of Congress moving forward.”
Racists gonna racist: Trump aide Stephen Miller and wife Katie Miller blamed immigration for the New York results. “Change the voters, change the country,” said Stephen. “New York will now be run by foreign communists,” burbled Katie.
Too late: Retiring Republican Senator Thom Tillis said he regretted his decisive vote to confirm Pete Hegseth as secretary of defense, citing concerns over the former Fox host’s alleged drinking and lack of experience.
Post alert: Postmaster General David Steiner told senators that under a proposed Trump administration rule, mail-in ballots won’t be delivered if states don’t give voter info to the federal government.
Court wins: An appeals court rejected the Trump administration’s attempt to get voter information from Michigan. A judge blocked a Trump order requiring citizenship proof to register to vote and requiring mail ballots be received by election day in 13 blue states.
🧠 Pop Quiz!
From which country did Sam Glosser, Stephen Miller’s great-grandfather, arrive in the U.S. as a penniless immigrant in 1903?
Keep your eyes out for the answer below!
🌏 Anywhere But America
🇵🇸 Don’t forget Gaza: A day after a UN report said Israel “deliberately targeted Palestinian children resulting in genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes,” a 12-year-old boy was killed by a strike that also wounded several. More than 1,000 people have been killed by Israel since the “ceasefire” last October.
🇻🇪 Major quakes: Magnitude 7.2 and 7.5 earthquakes hit Venezuela yesterday, killing more than 160 people after collapsing buildings in the capital Caracas. The death toll is expected to rise.
🇺🇦🇷🇺 Major strike: After Ukraine hit a Russian natural gas plant, President Volodymyr Zelensky said, “It is important that as many Russians as possible come to understand that it is the Russian leadership’s rejection of diplomacy that is prolonging the war.”
🇬🇧🇫🇷 Hot stuff: With much of western Europe suffering under a “heat dome,” France recorded its hottest ever day, with the national thermal indicator, which averages day and night temperatures at 30 weather stations, hitting 85.6 degrees Fahrenheit (29.8 degrees Celsius). The UK also saw its hottest-ever day in June, with Gosport, Hampshire, recording a temperature of 97 degrees Fahrenheit (36.1 degrees Celsius).
🇨🇴 Colombia concession: Progressive Iván Cepeda admitted defeat by Abelardo de la Espriella, the far-right presidential candidate backed by Donald Trump.
🇿🇼 Power grab: Zimbabwe’s Senate approved a bill to keep 83-year-old President Emmerson Mnangagwa, aka “The Crocodile,” in office until 2030. The measure also provides for the president to be elected by parliament.
😳 WTF?!
Oratory on Capitol Hill has… changed. Here, GOP Senator Thom Tillis tells reporters what he thinks shameless MAGA warrior Bill Pulte is about to produce as acting director of national intelligence. It’s almost as if Trumpism has coarsened our politics.
🧠 Trivia answer: Belarus, as described here by his own uncle, under the headline, ‘Stephen Miller Is an Immigration Hypocrite.’
ICYMI From Zeteo
Zeteo’s Martin Pengelly contributed to this newsletter.
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re algae and murdered ducks: in NYC, the Central Park lake and other bodies of water have signs warning people to keep dogs and themselves out of the water during algae season because the algae is toxic. Also: Trump's motorcade drove the length of the Reflecting Pool, so it's likely it is badly cracked. It might be best to check for structural faults in the pool, self-inflicted of course, before arresting and charging passersby. RIP ducks btw. Hope their feathered colleagues stay away.
Everything this man touches, he destroys! Collectively, and piece by piece, DJT is taking us down. I don’t even understand why the 25th amendment is not protecting us from this deranged lunatic psychotic felon.