# FiveStack: Everything Trump Touches Rots

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/fivestack-with-dean-blundell-zev-shalev-7267639/fivestack-everything-trump-touches-rots
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/fivestack-with-dean-blundell-zev-shalev-7267639/fivestack-everything-trump-touches-rots.md
Podcast: [FiveStack with Dean Blundell & Zev Shalev](https://stenobird.com/podcast/fivestack-with-dean-blundell-zev-shalev-7267639)
Published: 2026-06-15T20:32:37+00:00
Episode link: https://www.narativ.org/p/fivestack-everything-trump-touches
Audio file: https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/202170450/328677941eb8cedc70b547cbcf8f8e60.mp3
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JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/fivestack-with-dean-blundell-zev-shalev-7267639/episodes/fivestack-everything-trump-touches-rots
Duration seconds: 3303

## Resource

5️⃣ The Green on the Mall Trump’s $14.2 million repaint of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool — a deeper “American flag blue” ordered up for the country’s 250th — turned green with algae within days of completion. The Interior Department calls the bloom “residual,” a hangover from supply lines that sat dormant during construction. The mechanism was no mystery to Dean, who’s built and owned pools: drop a dark coating into a shallow, slow-moving basin and you grow algae — a problem flagged in advance and waved off. Zev pulled the metaphor all the way out — the toxic sludge taking over the pool right after Trump’s attempt to fix it is exactly what he’s done to the whole American system. Dean capped it: the most photographed pool in America, at the feet of the man who ended slavery and the spot where Martin Luther King Jr. spoke, remade to look better and emerging covered in sludge — “everything this guy touches rots.” It rhymed with the rest of the weekend’s vanity projects: the Kennedy Center name tarped over on a judge’s order, a planned “Trump Promenade” at the Lincoln Memorial, the Rose Garden paved, the East Wing torn down for a ballroom. Polish the facade, ignore what’s rotting beneath it. 4️⃣ Amanda Ungaro and the Friend Trump Has Kept Longest The show turned to Zev’s Thursday interview with Amanda Ungaro, who asked to be described as the mother of the son of Paolo Zampoli — an envoy inside the Trump administration and, by Trump’s own history, his longest-running friend, dating to 1985. Ungaro alleges that as she fought for custody, Zampoli used his government connections to have her arrested by ICE, held three and a half months, and deported, while their son stayed behind. These are her allegations; Zampoli has not answered them publicly, and he has not been rem…

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## Transcript

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