The following is a lightly edited transcript of the June 23 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.Donald Trump is growing angrier over the strange saga involving his plan to renovate the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, which is beset with an algae problem and with peeling paint. In a series of posts, he’s raged at a journalist for reporting on it, fulminated that vandalism is the real problem, and hailed a series of arrests that have now taken place there, which are really bizarre and raise lots of unanswered questions.This whole sorry tale is taking on much broader significance than you might expect. It’s displaying many of the pathologies of this whole presidency and this broader moment in America—from the megalomania to the incompetence, to the corruption, to the sheer tinpot banana republic vibe that’s settled on our nation’s capital. Michael Tomasky, the editor of The New Republic, has a good new piece digging into the subtext of this saga, so we’re working through all of it with him today. Mike, good to have you back on.Michael Tomasky: Nice to be with you, Greg. Thanks.Sargent: So before we get to the discussion of the arrests, can you quickly sum up one point for us? You argue in your piece that the Reflecting Pool saga is a real presidential scandal. I wondered if you could just recap the story up until the arrests—how we kind of went from having the Reflecting Pool as we’ve always known it to having one full of algae and peeling paint.Tomasky: Sure. Well, I gather that it did need work, drainage work, and that part of it is legitimate. And something was done under Obama that did cost a lot more, $35 million, and it didn’t fix the problem the way it was supposed to. So that may be part of Trump’s motivation. But his real motivation is his vanity and getting something, putting his stamp on Washington in advance of the America 250 celebrations, but just in general, for time immemorial.So he puts his name on the Kennedy Center, he puts his name on the Institute for Peace, and of course tearing down the East Wing and putting up that ballroom without any permits, without any of the normal processes that are supposed to come into play when you do something like that to a landmark historic building. And the arch in front of the Arlington Cemetery.So here we are. I don’t know why it had to be blue. Nobody really understands quite why it had to be blue. These people did a swimming pool for him in Virginia that was blue and he liked it, so it suddenly needed to be blue. It’s been green for a century. And now it’s become this disaster with the no-bid contracts and the massive cost overrun. He started out talking about $1.7, $1.8 million. It’s now nudging up against $15 million.And he said it was going to take a week and now—where is it?—six weeks, two months, and it’s going to go on and on.Sargent: And where did the algae come from? Can you just kind of take us up to the present? And I feel like that’s such a richly symbolic thing. He’s the “Drain the Swamp” president. He was talking about making this thing crystal clear, right? Making the water crystal clear, transparent, as it were. And he’s utterly failed at that. Now, I don’t know to what degree that’s his fault. Nature’s a complex thing, in fairness to Donald Trump. But it just seems perfectly symbolic in a way that it’s now filled with this infestation.Tomasky: Totally symbolic. And am I a marine horticulturalist? No, I am not. But I know this much just from reading about this. Until those Obama renovations, the source of the water for the Reflecting Pool, which is 18 inches deep around the edges and as deep as 30 inches in the middle, was Washington, D.C.’s drinking water supply. Then it changed, so that the source of water was the tidal basin. The tidal basin is the smallish body of water—it’s about the size of a lake, for people who don’t know Washington—and it’s where the Jefferson Memorial sits and where the cherry blossom trees surround it. So the water comes from the tidal basin. So there’s algae. There’s algae in water that comes from nature. Go figure.Sargent: OK, so Trump is getting angrier about the situation. In the last few days, he’s tweeted about the arrests we’ve seen at the Reflecting Pool. As of Saturday night, we’ve seen five people arrested and charged with vandalism. A number of others issued citations, according to the reporting. But what’s going on here is really murky, as it were. One of those detained is saying he reached into the pool to feel a piece of the liner that had become detached from the pool bottom. Another person was detained after taking a piece of paint out of the water.Mike, these don’t seem like Antifa vandals to me. Do we know anything more than this? And what does your gut tell you about what’s really going on with these arrests?Tomasky: In the case of the first gentleman, that’s a guy named David Hearn. I wrote about his saga in my piece today. And this got quite a lot of coverage over the weekend. He was out on a bike ride. He’s a former U.S. Olympic athlete—a canoeist, a canoe racer. And he was out on a long bike ride. I saw it described variously as 50 miles, 64 miles. I ride my bike sometimes on Saturdays too. Fifteen is a good Saturday for me, a really good Saturday. So this guy—and he’s 67 years old—so he’s in some kind of shape. And he was an Olympic athlete. I doubt he’s stealing pieces.He said this piece of the rubberized liner was partially detached and he reached into the Reflecting Pool just to see how it felt. And the next thing he knew, he said, he was in handcuffs. He also had the misfortune of this right-wing journalist named Emily Miller, who’s gone back and forth between One America News and The Washington Times and local Fox over the years, happened to be there, I guess, and videotaped him and maybe showed it to park police or something like that. I don’t know. It’s all, as you say, very opaque.And why these people are being arrested—it’s just not clear yet. As far as I know, talking on Monday afternoon, the park police and the Department of the Interior haven’t commented on these arrests.Sargent: Amazing. And CBS reports that one of the people arrested was the same individual who Trump accused in one of his tweets of using a knife to carve a 250-foot gash into the facade. Mike, 250 feet is nearly the length of a football field. And the choice of the 250 number sure sounds suspiciously like an echo of the 250th anniversary that this Reflecting Pool is supposed to be a part of. So it sort of seems like maybe that number was rattling around in Trump’s head or something.Now, again, maybe someone did do this. I can’t seem to find evidence of it. But does it seem likely to you that someone would try to carve something that long into the facade—like a 250-foot-long line?Tomasky: No, it doesn’t seem likely, but you never know. I could believe that there are people who aren’t fans of Trump out there who might vandalize this thing because it’s become such a symbol to him. I can believe that. But if that’s true, tell us. Show us the evidence. Give us the names and tell us what they did. I don’t support people damaging federal government property, especially historic landmarks like that. I’m sure you don’t either. I’m sure nobody listening to us does. If somebody did that, arrest them, charge them, prosecute them, sic Jeanine Pirro on them. But show us the evidence first.And so when Trump tweets over the weekend about vandals, I’m sorry—the man has been known to make things up from time to time. And so we’re going to regard that skeptically until there’s evidence.Sargent: So Trump is getting angrier about the situation in a series of tweets. On Friday, he tweeted that, “Lightweight ABC reporter Jonathan Karl was seen sticking his hand into the pool and trying to rip the rubber off of the surface.” Jonathan Karl had merely been reporting on this whole fiasco.Trump also raged that the “radical left lunatics, most likely Dumocrats who have spent their lives trying to ruin this country”—he basically said they were more or less responsible for this thing in some sense.And then on Saturday, he tweeted that “disgraceful vandalism” has marred the project, calling this an affront to George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, while characterizing his handling of the whole thing as impeccably perfect.One more tweet—on Monday, he said the only project of his that’s been vandalized is the Reflecting Pool. And then he talked about a “300 foot long gash” carved by vandals. So it’s apparently gotten 50 feet longer.Mike, Trump really seems to be spiraling downwards with this stuff. What do you make of it?Tomasky: He really is. And it’s just such a perfect Trumpy obsession. It’s a minor thing that to him is a very major thing because it’s about his self-image, his self-regard, his monstrous yet very fragile ego. All these things that he puts on display before us, the American people, constantly every day—about how he’s going to destroy a civilization, about how ICE is doing a magnificent job, about how all his enemies belong in jail, about the personal vendettas that he’s pursuing through the office of the presidency, which are totally inappropriate and completely impeachable offenses.All of these things are just about his ego, again, which is huge, as we all know. But what’s important here is the fragility of it. And that’s why he gets so defensive. And that’s how a gash grows from 250 feet to 300 feet. The Reflecting Pool, I believe, is about 600 feet long. So if he ever posts that it was a 700-foot gash, then we’ll know that couldn’t possibly happen—unless maybe the person went up and back. This is just his psychodrama that is bananas. It’s the same thing at work when we watch those Cabinet meetings and they go around the Cabinet table and they all have to offer praise of him, each more effusive than the last, each saying, no, you deserve two Nobel Prizes. No, three Nobel Prizes. Four Nobel Prizes and two Pulitzers, sir.It’s just a preposterous situation to be in in a democratic country. And this is the point I’d like to make. This is the kind of thing that happens in dictatorships. It’s not supposed to happen in a democratic country, in a democratic republic. We’re not supposed to have this kind of a leader who is so fragile and breakable.We’re supposed to have processes that are democratic, that give people input into what’s going to happen with the eastern side of the White House, that give people input into the renaming of a venerated cultural institution that’s been here in the nation’s capital for 60 years. The people are supposed to have input into these things. And they’re supposed to go through processes. And yes, experts, the much-reviled experts, are supposed to be able to weigh in on this stuff.But Trump, of course, knows better than everybody. And that’s just not a small-d democratic impulse or way to go about doing things.Sargent: Yeah, and I think your piece got at that really well, the larger importance of this whole thing. And I just want to flag for people—what was really telling to me was the way Trump talked about the project. I forget at which event it was, but he was essentially talking about the contractors on the project in almost precisely the same tone and with the same posture that he would about one of his own real estate projects. And I think that’s the essence of this, which is that Donald Trump doesn’t get on some very basic level that this stuff is not his. This is not an imperial capital. It is the capital of a republic. And as a result, he doesn’t own this stuff. He is a steward of it, a temporary steward. And as you say, there are processes. But in a way, this whole story shows somebody trying to dispense with that larger idea.Tomasky: Right. He wants to be the czar. That’s probably the best historical analogy that we can come up with. I went to St. Petersburg once in June. And it was like 50 degrees there anyway. And I walked around the Hermitage, which of course is beautiful and magnificent, the art and all that stuff. But I also walked around that place thinking—I asked my tour guide, I said, how many people lived here? And she said, six. The czar and his family.And it was as gilt-edged in gold as the Oval Office now is. But that’s how Trump thinks of himself. And that’s what he wants to be. He wants to be a czar. And that’s what all these things that he’s trying to do to Washington prove. And it’s really very, very distasteful.And by the way, I only mentioned this very quickly and you just alluded to it, but we should spend a little bit more time dwelling on the no-bid aspect of these contracts. That’s sewer corruption. That’s just basic corruption 101. You can’t do that. You can’t let out no-bid contracts. One of them was, ironically, to a place called Greenwater, which is really funny. That’s the Gafaro guy from Ohio. Then the other one was the swimming pool people from Virginia who did the pool at his golf club in Virginia. But these were both no-bid contracts.And one of the two, I think the first one—David Fahrenthold of The New York Times reported, he’s so good at this sort of thing—is charging a 20 percent profit margin into their contract when the normal profit margins on this kind of work for the federal government are six to 12 percent. But they just padded it, and the guy’s a donor of Trump’s, a donor and a neighbor in Palm Beach, and he just padded it up to 20 percent and got the contract without any competitive bidding.That alone is an impeachable offense right there. Boom. There’s just no question about it. I don’t know, what are they going to—if the Democrats take the House, what are they going to impeach him on? I mean, there’s 46 possibilities.Sargent: Right. And your piece really made the point very well that if this were just an ordinary moment, that would be a huge scandal. But since we’re in this really extraordinary moment, it isn’t.I want to close on this thought, which kind of pulls all this together, I hope. One of the consistent things in the reporting here has been that many people are just stopping by the Reflecting Pool to look at the algae and the peeling paint, to almost marvel at the spectacle of it. And you did that too, right? You stopped by and marveled at the spectacle of it.And I think for a lot of people, what they’re actually marveling at is what Trump has done to our country—how all this didn’t have to happen, how it’s all just rooted in megalomania and incompetence and corruption and derangement. I strongly suspect that this story, the Reflecting Pool, just like the ballroom, has immense symbolic importance to ordinary people in a way that we still haven’t gotten our heads around. And I just wanted you to talk a little bit about that.Tomasky: The day I rode my bike down there, I took a couple photographs of it just for my own amusement. I posted one on Facebook and I said, well, this looks pretty green to me—something kind of offhanded. I post political-ish things on my Facebook feed from time to time. And it’s interesting because it’s not my New Republic readership. This is old high school friends, many of whom are MAGA, many of whom have politics basically like mine. So it’s a mix and I get to see a mix.Usually when I post a political kind of thing on Facebook, 50 people either give it a like or have some kind of comment. Seventy, 80 people. This one—the last time I looked—870 responses.Sargent: I really do think it has that sort of importance for people. It really represents this presidency and what’s happening to this country under this presidency, don’t you think?Tomasky: Yeah, it really does. And it’s just such an emotionally potent symbol for people. Most people have been to Washington when they were in eighth grade, or later they brought their families here. And you’re sitting there right in the shadow of the beautiful, tasteful, grand but not opulent or self-regarding memorial to our greatest president—and I mean Lincoln. The Washington Monument is up the way, but it’s a little farther away.Yeah, to our greatest president and to a very humble man, and to a man who probably, if he could come back, would say, you built that for me? Why? Donald Trump will want something three times that size. As indeed the arch—it’s not quite three times, but the Lincoln Memorial is about 130 feet high at its peak and this arch is twice that.So yeah, this is really important. And it’s why—and to conclude on a point that you often make in your writing and podcasting—this is why Democrats shouldn’t just let this one slide and just talk about affordability or whatever. No, you can walk and chew gum, Democrats. Talk about this stuff. People care. Sargent: People really care about it. And just to underscore the point one last time, I really wonder whether this sort of thing—the tearing down of the East Wing of the White House, the piles of rubble that are on everybody’s phones all across the country, the kind of viral nature of this imagery, the viral nature of the imagery of the algae in the Reflecting Pool—I do wonder whether people are sort of in some deep sense reconsidering republican, small-r republican governance and saying to themselves, that thing was pretty cool that we’ve lost. Do you think that’s maybe going on? Do you think that’s what’s happening?Tomasky: I hope so. I don’t know, but I hope so. Twenty-five percent of the country is always going to support him no matter what, maybe 30, maybe a little more. But I’d like to think that the people whose politics aren’t like yours and mine, but people who aren’t terribly political, have enough of a civic impulse running through them that this bothers them. And that even if they can’t quite exactly articulate to themselves why, they know something about this isn’t right—this isn’t how stuff’s supposed to go down in the United States of America. I think they do. Enough of them anyway.Sargent: Really well said, Michael Tomasky. It was a pleasure having you on. Folks, if you want to read what Mike wrote about this—and you should—the piece is up at NewRepublic.com. It’s called “Vandalism at the Reflecting Pool? Yes, It Was Committed by Donald Trump.” Well said, Mike. Thanks for coming on.Tomasky: Enjoyed it. Thanks for having me.