The Reflecting Pool fiasco
6/25/202626 min
Donald Trump famously came to Washington, DC to “drain the swamp,” but he may have inadvertently created one.
This episode was produced by Hady Mawajdeh and Peter Balonon-Rosen, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Gabriel Dunatov, engineered by David Tatasciore and Patrick Boyd, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram.
The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool and algae this morning. Photo by Sean Rameswaram/Vox.
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First 90 secondsSean Rameswaram· Host0:01
Sean Rameswaram out here on the National Mall, about halfway between the World War II and Lincoln Memorials, which is to say I'm standing next to our Reflecting Pool. And I'd like to take a moment, just sit right there, talk about how it isn't just nominally a reflecting pool. I've lived here for about a decade, and just about any time you come out here, you'll see people in a state of quiet contemplation. And I think that's because, you know, it's a quiet place. It's, it's open. It's, it's free. It's, it's free for you in the winter to try and test your luck skating the Reflecting Pool in your sneakers, or in the summer I've seen people take a little dip in. Sometimes intentionally, sometimes unintentionally. Uh, as you know, as of late, it's felt a lot less free out here at the Reflecting Pool, and we're gonna get into it on Today Explained from Vox. Support for this show today comes from Anthropic, the team behind Claude. Claude is the AI for minds that don't stop at good enough. It's the collaborator that actually understands your entire workflow and thinks with you. Whether you're debugging code at midnight or strategizing your next business move, Claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter. With deep research, Claude's research capabilities go way deeper than basic web search. Comprehensive, reliable analysis with proper citations, turning hours of research into