Trump’s Reflecting LAKE update

Added: 2026-06-01

[00:00:00]Donald Trump spent almost 10 minutes talking about the reflecting pool when he was in a cabinet meeting and he should have been talking about I don't know Iran and how we get out of this war that he created and thanks to Ms. Now they gave me some clips to be able to share with you an analyst from a speech language pathologist perspective.

[00:00:17]>> She is looking beautiful. The fountains are almost all open. We had 28 of them and we have one in particular, a very long lake we call the reflecting lake between the uh Lincoln monument.

[00:00:31]Nobody's ever seen say anything like it.

[00:00:34]>> Donald Trump continues to call it the reflecting lake. He cannot find the word pool. He cannot remember it's the the reflecting pool. That is called a semantic paraphasia. that is that when you have like a word that's somewhat adjacent where it has a similar meaning but it is not correct. Now sometimes if I'm talking about a lake or pool they might be interchangeable probably not though they they're pretty different meanings but when it is in the name of the object of the thing that you are talking about no I cannot just say that it is the reflecting lake. He also calls it the Lincoln monument. We call it the Lincoln memorial. And he also uses the preposition between but does not actually say what it's between. He only gives one of the two. So he has put together the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial. It is between the reflecting lake is between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial. And therefore in his mind those two went together. So he said the Lincoln Monument. And that is why he could not find he could not put in the it's between this and that. It's just it's between this and it ended >> because it's like putting the skin on a a skyscraper but bigger much bigger.

[00:01:52]Many skyscrapers you can almost say other than for the world's think of it.

[00:01:55]The world's tallest skyscraper is shorter than 2,400 ft.

[00:02:01]>> There was a lot going on in that short clip. So, first of all, comparing a flat surface to a skyscraper and saying it is longer than the tallest skyscraper doesn't matter. Like, the skyscraper has limitations based off of things like gravity and safety. Like, me being able to dig a hole in the ground, as difficult as I'm sure it is to make one that is that is that big, is not the biggest deal that he is making. and then comparing it to the skyscraper. It's like putting a skin on a skyscraper.

[00:02:36]That is something called abstraction.

[00:02:38]I'm trying to compare apples to oranges.

[00:02:41]How are apples and oranges similar?

[00:02:43]Well, they're both fruit, but there are differences. One has a peel that you might eat and one has one that you wouldn't eat. That actually is on his cognitive test that he keeps saying that he is acing. This abstraction, this ability to tell me how are these two things similar? how are a watch and a ruler alike. So, he's showing us that he can't do that in real life. That is a real linguistic skill that clearly is not going well for him. He also had revisions in that clip where he would start to go and start to talk about something and then he would abruptly stop and start saying like a whole different sentence. So, those are called revisions. when you don't finish a complete sentence and then you go off and you start to say something else. A lot of times that is because the person who's speaking is having word finding difficulties. Word finding meaning I know where I want to go and I can't get the words out. And it is um it is kind of a saving face type of strategy where you just don't even bother finishing and you try to go on and do and and talk about it a different way or talk about something else. So there's a lot of incomplete sentences when Donald Trump talks and that is likely where those come from.

[00:03:53]>> It's going to take years to build three years, four years and we'll have it done before July 4th and substantially before July 4th. If we didn't have such bad weather the last four or five days, we could have been almost done. If Donald Trump is really the construction guru that he says he is, he should know that if somebody says it's going to take years to do and then another company comes in and they say actually we can do it in months that he's getting screwed.

[00:04:21]Now I am also fully aware that there was no one else bidding like there were no this is a no- bid contract to people that he I don't know who are loyal to him and just got a bunch of money to do this thing and are probably not qualified to do it. So all of that was just a lie anyway because no one would have told him it was going to take years to do. But the fact that he can't realize like I'm telling the American public that it's going to take someone told me it's going to take years but I'm going to do it in months is not a good look. That's part of dementia. I'm going to actually talk about this clip before I play it because I want you to be aware of his speech production. His speech sounds in this one. There are a lot of S's and everything sounds very very imprecise. and uh steam cleaned it. We then uh sand blasted it and then we pebble blasted it and a bigger version of sand. We we made the surface as good as it can be.

[00:05:15]>> That imprecision is fine motor coordination that is deteriorating. So his ability to coordinate the speech sounds that happen in his mouth. You have to coordinate your respiratory system with your phonation system, your voicing with your articulatory system.

[00:05:31]That is very difficult and especially for him, he specifically has difficulty with the S's sh and the L. So anything like a lateral sound L and then the back sounds the C-g sounds. Those are all very very imprecise and when you hear that it's very imprecise. Then also something like pebble blasted. That's a lot of this bilabial pab pab and that can be very hard. It's kind of like we have something called diodoko kinetic rates where you would test someone going p-p- t- c. So mine I do not have any type of brain deterioration. I'm able to do it quickly and fluently. I bet if we got him to do that it would sound so bad.

[00:06:15]>> It it was built I guess a little after the Lincoln. It's embarrassing.

[00:06:20]>> Remember how in the beginning where he didn't know whether it was Lincoln Memorial or Lincoln monument? Same thing here because he starts to say memorial and he doesn't finish the Lincoln memo and then he stops because his brain is not sure what's right and it's just like maybe I just won't say it at all. So he was actually correct and it is memorial but he didn't finish saying the word because his brain is still stuck on is it memorial is it monument and that is peververation and that language confusion.

[00:06:49]>> It's going to be unbelievable. It will be unbelievable. It's actually exciting.

[00:06:52]I want to ride over there today if I can.

[00:06:55]>> We are in the middle of negotiations with Iran that seemingly aren't going well since we're apparently going to just be attacking them again. But he's going to go take a little joy ride over to the reflecting lake and he's going to go what? Drive on it again because that's going to be really good for the surface is having a whole motorcade of cars driving on a surface that you say is poorly constructed and poorly done and you're going to actually cause even more damage to it. that's going to make it take more time and cost more money.

[00:07:23]Sure, that sounds like something that a person who's all with it would be doing.

[00:07:28]For this final clip, I'm also going to preemptively tell you, listen to the speech sounds. Listen to how it just sounds imprecise.

[00:07:36]>> Uh I made a contribution to redoing Lafayette Park. That's the entrance to the White House and it was an embarrassment and uh it's going to be really beautiful. That was really the front door to the White House when you couldn't even use it. It was so terrible. People would come to the White House and it was so terrible. So with that, I'm going to ask Pete to talk a little about some of our great success.

[00:07:59]Yes, sir. Including Venezuela. You might >> I'm pretty sure that he meant Iran and not Venezuela. So yet another time when his brain is just filling in another semantically similar word. In this case, it's another country that we had military action in. And I don't think they're talking about Venezuela during this cabinet meeting. So, in summary, Donald Trump spent 10 minutes talking about the reflecting pool or that he calls lake or pond without realizing that it's also called the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument, which he never actually said it was the Washington Monument. He had lots of semantic paraphas. He had lots of slurpee and slushy speech. He had difficulty with coordinating some of his syllables together. He had revisions for his his sentences where he went and started one sentence and then he stopped and went a different direction. He demonstrated really poor judgment in decisionmaking as far as I'm going to go drive on the surface of the lake that we are supposedly fixing and I'm going to actually cause more damage. He also just had really bad disinhibition to say like is this the most appropriate place to be talking about the construction that's happening to so-called beautify Washington DC in the middle of a cabinet meeting where you should be talking about how do we get ourselves out of the war in Iran. Also, if you think about it, if he is aware of the fact that he is falling asleep at all times and he maybe wants to make his cabinet meetings a little bit shorter so he is less likely to fall asleep, then he would stop talking about the things like the reflecting pool. But that's what he wants to talk about because that's what he cares about. He doesn't give a about the rest of the stuff. And so therefore, he's going to put his stuff out there. And I'm sure he probably fell asleep after they started talking. He does like to fall asleep when Pete Hegs Seth is talking. I don't actually blame him for that one, but he should be staying awake during these meetings. He is making them longer by talking about his BS. And therefore, he's got to go.