Trump Hosts Bizarre Show-and-Tell With Photos of Reflecting Pool

Instead of making a sober and succinct pitch to voters on the final day before a consequential midterm election, President Trump decided to spend most of his speech rambling about Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool renovations.

“Today I’m thrilled to announce the official opening of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool,” he said Monday afternoon, before making a joke that he planned on changing the name to the “Trump Reflecting Pool.”

“The pool is now better and more beautiful than it’s ever been before. And we went through a lot with vandalism. The vandalism was unprecedented,” Trump continued, again pushing the spurious claim that leftist criminals—not his own poor design decisions—were responsible for the “American flag blue” paint at the bottom of the pool peeling off.

Trump then turned to the show-and-tell portion of his speech, pulling out a series of pictures of algae, graffiti, and other issues with the renovations and analyzing them live, as if he had just seen the photos for the first time.

“These are the pipes.… You know it’s been there since 1922, I guess. It’s in bad shape.… [There were] tremendous algae problems. You have that picture with the algae?” he asked an aide. “Yeah, lemme see that. This was a picture taken just before they closed it down. And this picture, this was in the Biden era.… They just spend money after money after money. It’s not an easy thing. The algae’s brutal, it forms easily, and we have it.… That’s not grass, that’s algae.”

“I can’t believe he is actually making his closing argument speech about the reflecting pool renovations,” liberal podcaster and former Obama staffer Tommy Vietor wrote. “This is a bad resistance lib joke come to life.”

While the president eventually did get to more pressing issues, the first 15 minutes of his speech were spent talking about something the vast majority of Americans have no reason to care about at all. People across the country are reeling from Trump’s litany of broken promises, with this new forever war on Iran and the spiking cost of living. That’s nothing to say of other failures, like the DOJ’s botched release of the Epstein files. There’s more than one reason his approval rating is incredibly low, and it sure looks like it’s about to haunt Republicans on Tuesday.

Democratic Representative Haley Stevens’s endorsement of Republican Mike Rogers for the Senate in Michigan came out of nowhere, and a train-wreck interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper hours later didn’t answer anyone’s questions as to why she pulled her support from Democratic nominee Abdul El-Sayed.

Instead, she decided to offer a full explanation to Olivia Reingold of right-wing outlet The Free Press, who interviewed Stevens at her fiancé Justin Turkish’s home at 11 p.m. Sunday night in the Detroit suburbs. Stevens said she decided to endorse Rogers because she “wasn’t being honest with myself after a certain point.”

The congresswoman told Reingold that it came down to El-Sayed being “obsessive” regarding Israel, pointing to his refusal to say whether Israel or Iran was a greater threat to America in a debate with Rogers. She said his statement in late September that “it is the responsibility of the people of Iran to decide what their leadership should look like” was a refusal to condemn the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. She said that Iran is the “opposite of our friend.”

The final straw for Stevens, she told Reingold, was a Rebellion PAC TV ad supporting El-Sayed that attributed the rising price of groceries to U.S. support of Israel killing Palestinians. While El-Sayed’s campaign was not involved in the ad and has disavowed it, Stevens thinks that he is holding “anti-American” positions.

In response to Stevens’s endorsement, El-Sayed accused Stevens of “relitigating a primary that ended three months ago” and urged Democrats to rally together to defeat Rogers. Stevens claimed his statement went against the wishes of Jewish voters.

“God, I wanted to vote for him, but he just kind of said ‘Forget it,’” Stevens said. “I love the Democrats. I’m not trying to take anything from anyone or judge anybody or shame anybody.”

Stevens is in no position to accuse someone else of being obsessed with Israel. Her own Senate campaign was heavily funded by AIPAC and other pro-Israel groups, and she has a long and loud history of vocally supporting Israel. During the Democratic primary, El-Sayed’s campaign highlighted a clip from 2023 in which Stevens shouted, “Israel comes to me in my dreams” at a Hanukkah celebration.

That Stevens betrayed the Democratic Party, spurning leading party figures who reached out to her for days hoping to keep her in the fold, and then decided to complain about it all to a right-wing outlet founded by Bari Weiss says all you need to know.

President Donald Trump suggested Monday that he was open to pardoning Elon Musk.

During a pretaped interview on the New York Post’s Pod Force One, host Miranda Devine asked Trump about concerns that Democrats were plotting to arrest Musk, seize his factories, and nationalize SpaceX. (Of course, no Democratic lawmaker or candidate has actually called for any of that.)

“It won’t happen. It’s talk. But if it is talk, we’ll have to protect them,” Trump said.

Devine asked whether Trump would consider preemptively pardoning Musk and other allies who’d worked for his administration.

“Well, that’s what [Joe] Biden did. He gave everybody a pardon,” Trump said, referring to members of a committee who investigated the deadly January 6 riot.

“I would if I needed to, sure. I would not even think about it. I’d do it, I did it for J6,” he added.

If Democrats win back one or both chambers of Congress, they have signaled they plan to investigate Musk’s shady leadership of the defunct Department of Government Efficiency, his companies’ lucrative contracts with the federal government, and his alleged role in cutting Ukraine’s Starlink access, perhaps on behalf of his close friend Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Musk has used his proximity to Trump to boost his many businesses in foreign countries. In some cases, the administration even pressured foreign governments into approving his products. Musk was also the biggest individual winner when Trump announced a 90-day pause on tariffs, sending Tesla stock shooting up 23 percent. Just because their plan didn’t work perfectly—and Musk ended up losing twice as much as he cut in government spending—doesn’t mean it wasn’t still corrupt.

Two staffers on Republican Mike Rogers’s Senate campaign are registered foreign agents for the state of Israel—including the campaign spokesperson who facilitated his Sunday press conference with Democratic Representative Haley Stevens.

Drop Site News reported Sunday that Abigail Ronson, a former Mike Johnson staffer and now Rogers campaign spokesperson, registered as a foreign agent for Israel back in May. The Foreign Agent Registration Act, or FARA, recognizes a foreign agent as someone who “within the United States (1) engages in ‘political activities’ on behalf of a foreign principal; (2) acts as a foreign principal’s public relations counsel, publicity agent, information-service employee, or political consultant; (3) solicits, collects, disburses, or dispenses contributions, loans, money, or other things of value for or in the interest of a foreign principal; or (4) represents the interests of the foreign principal before any agency or official of the U.S. government.”

Ronson announced the news Sunday that Stevens, the failed Democratic Senate nominee for Michigan, was at church with Rogers. She also facilitated the press conference in which Stevens endorsed Rogers despite earlier telling fellow Democrats she would support the party’s nominee, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed.

Ronson is connected to Rogers’s campaign through campaign strategy firm Convergence Media, and is subcontracted with the Havas Media Group, one of the primary vessels for pro-Israel ads and initiatives. Her FARA registration specifically states that she will offer “strategic communications, planning, and media services in support of Havas’ engagement by the State of Israel to develop and execute a nationwide campaign in the United States to combat anti-semitism.” Knowing that, it isn’t shocking to see her front and center in the midst of one of the most stunning political betrayals ever—especially given that it was centered around a debate over support for Israel and AIPAC’s election influence.

Another registered foreign agent for Israel, Jason Stokes, is also part of Rogers’s campaign through Convergence and Havas. Stokes registered as a foreign agent in October 2025 due to his work with Havas, Drop Site reported, and has written many of Rogers’s press releases.

President Trump is already casting doubt on the Alaska Senate election and said he’d consider redoing the race if incumbent Republican Senator Dan Sullivan loses.

On the New York Post’s Pod Force One podcast, released Monday, Miranda Devine asked Trump if he’d consider “redoing” the election if the contest was close. Trump said he thought the presence of third-party candidate Daniel J. Sullivan Jr. on the state ballot “was a criminal act” and he’d have to consult his lawyers about redoing the results.

“He even looks like Dan Sullivan. They go out and seek somebody with the name Dan Sullivan, they find a guy, but his middle initial is J, and he tries to have it changed to S, because that’s the real Dan Sullivan is Daniel S., and then they say, ‘We knew nothing about it,’” Trump said, attacking Democratic Senate nominee Mary Peltola, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, chair of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

Trump claims that all of these Democrats plotted “election fraud at the highest level” in order to win the seat. Last week, Alaska Republican Governor Mike Dunleavy seemed to agree, refusing to commit to certifying the state’s election results if Peltola wins.

“If we conclude that there were things that should not have happened, that are illegal, we will act on that,” Dunleavy said. “That may in fact impact whether somebody is seated in the U.S. Senate.”

That’s a disturbing prospect for Alaska voters, and it in fact overstates the impact of having two people of the same name on the ballot. Alaska has ranked-choice voting, which would minimize the risk of Republican voters picking the wrong candidate since they could rank both Sullivans.

Republicans have also attempted similar gambits in other elections. In Washington state in 2024, Democrat Bob Ferguson had to contend with two other Bob Fergusons for state attorney general, and ended up winning after they dropped out of the race. And it’s not clear that any laws were broken: Daniel J. Sullivan Jr. is a legal Alaska resident, and his candidacy has survived court challenges.