It’s Tuesday…
Shitshow’s public schedule for…
Fox News 05/05/2026:
President Donald Trump will sign a presidential memorandum Tuesday restoring the Presidential Fitness Test Award, according to the White House, reviving a competitive school-based fitness program phased out during the Obama administration.
[snip]
The original Presidential Physical Fitness Test was phased out during former President Barack Obama’s second term and replaced with the Presidential Youth Fitness Program, part of the “Let’s Move” initiative. Critics at the time argued that the test focused too much on performance and competition, discouraging less athletic students.
In his remarks surrounded by kids he talks about believing in genetics, 2020 was a rigged election, and that we can’t let Iran have a nuclear weapon.
Fox News 05/05/2026.
His remarks were his typical unhinged bullshit. Only this time he was surrounded by kids.
Where in his remarks did he promote healthy living?
— Ann-Tiff-A (@NewsiesNeighbor) May 5, 2026
He talked about genetics, someone who reminds him of Thor, said 2020 was rigged, and bored the kids to death with talking about war with Iran.
At no time did he talk about kids and physically fitness.
Somehow 9 minutes after I made that comment it got worse.
I’m pulling an audible and moving on. We will revisit his comments tomorrow…
Speaking of remarks…
Yesterday, during a small business event at the White House, Ramblin’ Man went off on an eight-minute detour about the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. Eight minutes. On a pond. At an event that was, allegedly, about small businesses.
Ramblin’ Man:
And, uh, I’ll give you just one little anecdote. We have a beautiful, potentially beautiful, built in 1922, it’s a long time ago, reflecting pond in between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial.
It’s 2,500 feet long. That’s taller than, I think, any building in the world, that would be if you lay it sideways. It’s two Empire State buildings, more than that, and very wide, 167 feet. And for years, they’ve wanted to fix it, rebuild it. It’s granite. The stone is good granite. It’s great.
But it was leaking because it’s little pieces of granite, very, very expensive when they did it, but it always leaked from the day they built it in 1922. And it leaked and leaked badly.
And they’ve looked at fixing it for decades, really fixing it. And it wasn’t working, it was too expensive. And the final price we got fairly recently was to fix it, it’s $350 million because they were going to take the granite out, and they were going to replace it with new granite, new stone, tighter joints, all that.
It was going to take three and a half years. And I heard about it, and I called Doug Burgum and I said, Doug, what do you think? I built a lot of swimming pools, hundreds of swimming pools in different jobs. I said, let me look at that surface. So it’s granite, so granite is virtually indestructible, but it was filthy, dirty.
It started because I called it because it was so dirty. It was disgusting. People called me and they’d say, you know, it’s a shame. I’m looking at the Washington Monument and this thing is terrible. The water is dirty, there’s cartons of stuff in it, and everything is just so horrible. And I said, wow, that’s terrible.
We can’t have that. I actually had Secret Service, I said, drive over there, I want to see it. Sir, we won’t be able to. I said, just do it. And I went, it was terrible. I looked at it, terrible. So think of that, so it was going to cost $350 million because they were going to take the granite out, put new granite and think, consider it like as tall as the tallest building in the world, if not taller and laying on its side.
And I said, wow, that’s terrible, $350 million. It’s going to take three and a half years, three and a half years. And you know, three and a half years means five years. $350 million means $500 million to fix a thing. And I said, you know, I built all these swimming pools and they’re phenomenal.
They’re 20 years. I have one up the road where it’s a great club on the Potomac River and I bought it, I bet 20-something, 21 years ago. And I built a beautiful Olympic-sized pool. And I asked the other day, I said, how good is the pool? Oh, it’s beautiful, sir. I looked at it. It looks like it’s brand-new.
It’s done 20 years ago. So I have some very good contractors, some good, one or two in particular. And I sent the two of the, actually, the three best. I said, do me a favor, fellas, go take a look at the reflecting pool that sits in between Lincoln and Washington, the beautiful, what should be beautiful reflecting pool.
And one of them who came back, who’s really, I would say the best, but they’re all good, he came back, he said, what an exciting job, sir. I said, so how long would it take you to redo it? He said, well, we have to fix the surface a little bit, create something good and solid underneath. That’ll take about a week.
And let’s say it’ll take me to put the new material. Now, the swimming pool is good, but he said, sir, I’d get commercial grade. What is that? He said, that’s much stronger, much heavier, meant for commercial. It actually looks better. It’s more expensive, sir. I said, that’s OK. I said, how much will it cost?
I think we can do it for about $1.9 million. So he said, what color would you like, sir? And I said, well, you know that beautiful color that we have in Florida? He said, this isn’t Florida, sir. We don’t have that green, blue around here. We have blue water, but he gave me a choice of 50 colors. Now I’m going crazy.
I’m saying, now think of it, if we put the granite, you know what your color is? It was gray. It was gray. Not a good looking color. So even if you did it, it’s not good. So he said, we’ll do a beautiful job. I think that I’d like to recommend a color that I’ve used before. It’s beautiful. What’s it called?
It’s called American Flag Blue. I said, that’s the color I want, because how can you have it better, right? I said, how can you have a better color than American flag? We had a gray, disgusting, dirty, it showed all the dirt, it showed all the everything. So we finished it about two or three days ago.
They roughened the surface. They left everything there. The demolition would have cost $60 million to take the stone out and put new stone in. So we cleaned it. We steam cleaned it. We sandblasted it. We pebble blasted. You know, pebble blasting, that’s a serious sandblast.
Because it’s granite, it’s so strong. We roughen the stone, so it’s a good surface. Got it immaculate and it’s beautiful, but it still has the lines in between. You’re going to have leaks all over the place. And we filled in some areas. And the work started a few days ago. And I wanted to go today.
I said, let me see these small business people and then I want to go over and see the contractors to see how they’re doing. But Secret Service was not thrilled. They were not thrilled of me standing in the middle of a pool with lots of buildings looking down. You know, we have to be a little conscious of that, right, Chris, or you’ll have a new boss someday.
And I don’t know if you’d like that. So here’s the story just in a nutshell. For a much better job, $1.9 million, one week, because I don’t call the, you know, actually, the Parks Department did a great job. They cleaned. I mean, a lot of men cleaning. They’re scrubbing the scum off, years and years of decay and bacteria and everything else you can think of. It was terrible, actually.
It was worse than the people would tell me. They say how bad it looked. It was much worse. The Parks Department did a fantastic job. They got it down to the surface, and these guys came in and made the surface really, really good. And now the beautiful, the fun starts and they’re putting it down.
So ready, $1.9 million versus $350 million. Right? Common sense, common sense. A great, beautiful blue color, American flag blue, as opposed to gray, right? What is not gray, right, but it’s one of those things. And instead of three and a half years, it’s one week. So think of that, one week.
So everybody says, well, yeah, but you can’t compare this. Yeah, you can.
It’s much better. It’s a much better job. This will last for at least 50 years and you’ll never have a leak. It’s very strong. You couldn’t, if you had a knife, I don’t want to give anybody ideas, you can’t even cut it, so strong, so powerful. It is beautiful, sealed.
And I looked at just one of the little pieces that they did, the finish, it’s like a piece of glass, beautiful color, beautiful everything. You could never get anything like that. And just think of it, so for a tiny fraction of the cost and a tiny fraction of the time, we end up with the most beautiful thing that you’ll ever see.
And I look so forward to that opening up. And it’s sort of a business thing, it’s a common sense thing. First thing I thought of when I heard $350 million, because I’m the one that said, let’s get it done. But they had done studies for years because they wanted to get it done, never got done. Probably so expensive, they couldn’t afford to do it, really.
But there’s a thing, common sense, right, a swimming pool. I said, well, swimming pool looks so beautiful, wouldn’t that be nice? So for a tiny fraction of the time, a tiny fraction of the cost, we end up with a much better product. And this is what you people do with small businesses all the time. It’s what Kelly does in running this.
She comes to me a lot of times with ideas for less money. It’s a better job. So I just, I thought I’d tell you that because this just happened. This just happened. If you go down, if you’d like to see them doing it on your way back home, take a trip down to the reflecting pond, or they call it the reflecting pool.
Some people call it the reflecting lake, but the word reflecting is always a part of it. They call it different things, but reflecting is always a part.
RollCall.com. 05/04/2026.
It’s 2,500 feet long. That’s taller than, I think, any building in the world, that would be if you lay it sideways. It’s two Empire State buildings, more than that, and very wide, 167 feet.
Narrator:
The Architect’s Newspaper says the pool is; The reflecting pool is 2,030 feet long and 170 feet wide. In section the pool is V-shaped; it ranges in depth from 18 inches to 30 inches. The granite lining the reflecting pool was laid in 1923, the year of completion.
The tallest building in the world Burj Khalifa in Dubai measures at a breath-taking 828 m (2,716 ft 6 in) according to Guinness World Records.com.
The reflecting pool lies aren’t the biggest lies he tells. Not even close. But they show the pattern. Everything becomes a competition, and somehow he’s always the winner. The pool matters because it was last refurbished in 2012. The fitness test award is back because it was softened in 2013. It’s not about fixing anything. It’s about undoing anything that doesn’t let him “win.”
This is an Open Thread
