On Monday night’s episode of “The Daily Show,” Jon Stewart addressed President Donald Trump’s debacle in renovating the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, which is now infested with algae.
Stewart opened the show on CNN’s audio, explaining that high phosphate levels in the pool caused a “massive algae bloom” that turned the monument into a “sea of green.”
“It’s really green,” Stewart joked. “It’s neon green! Did they replace the water with Mountain Dew?”
“The Daily Show” revealed through two separate soundbites that one of the companies working on the renovation won the job through a “no-bid contract” and was “owned by a trust run by Republican donor John Cafaro.” After sharing a photo of Cafaro with the audience, Stewart joked, “He looks like an extra on Guys and Dolls.”
“Is that a pool guy? Does Donald Trump deal with normal people?” Stewart exclaimed. “Looks like Donnie Brasco got stung by a bee. Sorry, but to be fair, this must be an old photo from the ’80s when Gomez Addams was all the rage.”
Stewart then cuts to Anderson Cooper, explaining that Cafaro is a “neighbor from Mar-a-Lago” who in 2001 “pleaded guilty to conspiring to bribe then-Rep. James Traficant Jr.”
“The pool guy?” Stewart said. “The pool guy bribed the congressman, and now he has a pool contract, and it’s being tracked. ‘What am I supposed to do? Let’s just say I’m in the chlorine control business.’ If you’re like me, when you first heard that there was algae growing in the reflecting pool, you probably thought, ‘I wish the president of the United States would personally be involved in monitoring this.'”
Watch the full monologue below.
