Song of the Day 5/15: Diana Ross & the Supremes, “Reflections”

Trump thinks he’s good at everything, but even in the one area where you’d expect him to have some expertise, construction, he’s a fuck-up. His buildings typically use glitzy facades to front for shoddy construction – the Plaza hotel he built in Atlantic City, for example, was condemned and razed in 2014 because pieces of the 30-year-old structure kept falling off.

So people are rightly concerned about his frenzied attempts to rebuild Washington DC in his image. The ballroom and triumphal arch get most of the publicity, but there’s no job too small for Trump to fuck up. Consider the botch he’s made of rehabbing the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool.

The picturesque pool has been plagued with problems since its construction in 1923. An expensive series of repairs over the past 17 years solved some issues but introduced others, and when another nine-figure fix was proposed, Trump declared he could do it in weeks instead of years, and at one-one hundredth the cost. He plunged ahead with his plan to reline the stone basin, and bypassed normal channels to award a no-bid “emergency” contract. And he knew just the company to do it. Or did he? According to the New York Times,

President Trump said publicly that he had recommended the firm because of good work it did on the swimming pools at one of his golf clubs. However, Mr. Trump did an about-face early Tuesday, distancing himself from the company. “I didn’t give out the contract, ‘Interior’ did, to a contractor I did not know, and have never used before,” Mr. Trump wrote in a post on his Truth Social.

The same level of honesty applies to Trump’s cost estimates, too. A week ago he said the work would cost $1.8 million. By early Tuesday the estimate was $5 million or $6 million. But public records show the contract will cost at least $13.1 million.

Of course, it’s not on time, either. The contract was awarded with a May 22 deadline, but earlier this week the job was only about one-third finished – and the work appears to be flawed.

Staff members said that bubbles and small holes had appeared in one of the layers meant to waterproof the iconic pool. And uneven application of the tinted waterproofing left the pool mottled in varying shades of blue.

It’s fitting, in a way. Of course Trump would fuck up a reflecting pool – he’s never reflected on anything in his life.

Diana Ross never seemed like the reflective type, either, but that didn’t stop her from taking this Holland-Dozier-Holland composition to No. 2. The Supremes had already scored 10 No. 1 hits when the HDH used this ballad to make Motown’s foray into the psychedelic sounds of ’67. One of their last productions for the label, it was kept from the top spot by Bobbie Gentry’s “Ode to Billy Joe.”

It was also the first record billed to Diana Ross & the Supremes. Co-founder Florence Ballard sang on it shortly before she was kicked out of the group, and this appearance on “Hollywood Palace” was Cindy Birdsong’s first TV appearance as her permanent replacement.