MSNBC host Chris Hayes laughed out loud Tuesday while covering a Fox News report on renovations to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, which saw “Jesse Watters Primetime” correspondent Johnny Belisario claim only Democrats would note how green the water is.
President Donald Trump has been fixated on cleaning the pool ahead of America’s 250th anniversary celebration this summer and has openly blamed his Democratic predecessors for the algae-riddled waters, but Belisario appeared to suggest Monday that the problem is over.
“I’m here at the newly renovated Reflecting Pool,” he said from the scene. “It’s painted American flag blue, and the Democrats are gonna tell you, ‘Oh, there’s green algae, it looks so bad.’ But there’s pool guys cleaning it up right now. No other president would do that.”
A U.S. National Park Service employee uses a vacuum pump to clean algae off the bottom of the newly repainted Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool on the National Mall on June 16 in Washington, D.C. The Trump Administration spent $14 million to have the bottom of the pool painted "American flag blue" and the seams resealed.
Hayes delivered a sizable chuckle after playing this clip on the air, as Belisario had been reporting in full view of the bright green waters while adamantly praising Trump for his renovations to the pool — and had even used a mocking voice to mimic “the Democrats.”
“Does that guy realize we can see the water behind him?!” Hayes asked through laughter.
The “All In” host argued earlier in the show that Trump probably expects the landmark to look “like his swimming pool at Mar-a-Lago,” utterly unaware that “it’s not a swimming pool” — and that it “doesn’t have the same cleaning systems or the same purpose” as one.
“It’s a reflecting pool full of largely stagnant water,” Hayes explained. “And so, as with so many Trump schemes, Americans are now stuck with a big, ugly mess, and conservatives are stuck pretending that it is all great, just great.”
The current algae blooms returned less than two weeks after the pool was refilled following Trump’s $14 million renovation, but are not a problem specific to him, as former President Barack Obama reportedly also saw the water turn green again after his own renovation project in 2012.
Hayes went on to read a statement from a Department of Interior spokesperson, who placed the blame for the “massive algae clumps taking over the pool’s surface” directly on Obama. Trump shared an AI-generated image earlier this year of Obama bathing in feces in the pool.
“Trump is laser-focused on this in a way that, well, you really wish a president was not,” said Hayes. “And so his government hired a Virginia contractor in a corrupt, non-competitive process to fix what President Obama had supposedly ruined.”
The spokesperson further claimed the algae is now “dead” due to the use of “advanced nanobubbler technology” and is being “vacuumed up as we speak.” They concluded by praising Trump “for fixing the Reflecting Pool for good,” just as Belisario had.
“Maybe,” Hayes said Tuesday after reading the statement. “Maybe they’re right. We’ll see. You can’t make this stuff up, though. They hired yet another set of contractors using nanobubbler machinery provided by a company called ... Green Water Solutions.”
The MS NOW host continued, “It’s all just Trump to a T: focus obsessively on things that do not matter, spend taxpayer money with no accountability, screw everything up, pretend it’s a great improvement — while leaving it to other people to clean up your mess.”
A duckling swims through algae in the newly repainted Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool on June 16.
