There's a war brewing in Washington, and the battlefield is the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. It has become the latest flashpoint in the media's relentless campaign against Donald Trump, and the coverage has been breathless, righteous, and wall-to-wall. Networks are dispatching reporters. They're consulting experts.
The real scandal here isn't green water. Algae has long been a problem with the reflecting pool, and at least the Trump administration is trying to do something about it. No, the real scandal is much bigger and deeper than the reflecting pool.
It's not even the selective outrage that is driving the coverage. We all know that Barack Obama launched a $34 million, multi-year overhaul of the same reflecting pool, and that the project stretched on for two years and ultimately failed to solve the algae problem or the leaks. The press barely blinked, and it certainly didn’t call Barack Obama a failure. Yet the moment algae returned on Trump's watch, every major left-leaning network thought they were covering the next Watergate.
Greg Gutfeld torched the whole spectacle on his late-night show Gutfeld! with the kind of surgical ridicule it deserved. "After Donald Trump cleaned the reflecting pool, which previously looked like the world's largest booger soup, the residue's back, turning the water green," Gutfeld said. "And suddenly, the media has found a new cause to champion. Forget violent crime, fraud, or the border. They never cared about that anyway. The media has found a new January 6th, and it's Shrek Snot."
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He wasn't wrong. MSNOW called the renovation "a big, expensive failure for Donald Trump." ABC's Jonathan Karl stood poolside, pointing at peeling sealant. Gutfeld had little patience for the theatrics. "After four years of ignoring a president covered with mold, you cover the pool like you're Captain Ahab in hip waders trying to give Aquaman a prostate exam," he said.
That's the real scandal here. For years, the same networks now obsessing over an algae bloom actively ignored mounting evidence that Joe Biden was cognitively unfit to serve as president. Reporters who can apparently run water tests in a reflecting pool somehow missed that the sitting commander-in-chief was wandering off during public events and losing his train of thought mid-sentence, and they called videos of Biden “cheap fakes” to please the administration.
"It's amazing how CNN can track algae growth, but somehow missed that the last president spent four years photosynthesizing,” Gutfeld mused.
CNN even consulted a pool store. A pool store. Gutfeld wasn't letting that one go, either. "Hell, I wonder who they consult with over crime. The bad guy store?"
The contrast with their lack of coverage of actual crises was glaring. Raw sewage dumped into the Potomac River barely registered. The reflecting pool gets a multi-segment investigation.
AlgaeGate: The Media’s Slimy New Obsession pic.twitter.com/sNIn6G65op
— Gutfeld! (@Gutfeldfox) June 23, 2026
The media's fixation on the reflecting pool, after years of ignoring Biden’s hidden decline, corruption, and actual policy failures, is the real scandal here. These people aren’t interested in journalism, only the preferred narrative. They are so desperate to make Trump the bad guy that they will go to extreme lengths to do so, even after they spent years pretending his predecessor was “sharp as a tack.”
