'I'm embarrassed even READING this to you': Nicolle on Trump GIDDY about his BIG pool renovation

That's your size compared.So those are compared to, those are among the tallest buildings in the world, including the Empire State Building, World Trade Center, Sears Tower, Chicago.So if you lay it on its side, you'd take two or three of them to fill it in, because the width is very, almost 200 feet wide, and actually much more than 2 ,000, close to including everything.It's about 2 ,500 feet in length to the end, and it's gonna be beautiful.

We have entered the My Pond is Bigger Than Your House part of the Trump presidency.I don't even know why those things are on the same piece of paper.Someone should have told him one was a body of water, the other three are buildings.All the same, he's obsessed with the size of things shaped like that.Hi again, everybody.It's now 5 o 'clock in New York.

That was real.It was another in a growing chronicle of things.I asked my team to vet to make sure it wasn't AI, that that was actually the president, not some stunt guy, that that was actually from the Oval Office, not a Jimmy Kimmel, you know, skit, that that was the president, that that was actually what he was holding, that it wasn't actually a map of something, and that he actually had a board with a body of water next to three buildings and was bragging that the body of water was bigger than the buildings.That happened today.It's part of his obsession with home decorating and renovations of Washington, D .C.

This is the reflecting pool.He's, for some reason, measuring it against the length of the pool against the height of skyscrapers.Makes no sense at all.I'm embarrassed even reading this to you, especially in a moment when Americans are screaming from the rooftops about the price of gas, cost of child care, cost of health care and the economy, as well as unhealthyabout the war with Iran.But Trump is obsessed with this stuff.

He's done a redo of the south lawn.That is a live picture of what he's done to what was the once beautiful, beautiful grounds of the White House.This is his cage match thing.It looks like something at a museum.I don't know, amusement park or something.It's a place where they're going to have a fight.

He's demolished large swaths of the people's house to build a ballroom.He's paved the Rose Garden.He put his name on the Kennedy Center, which the Washington Post today reports will have to take it down.They have to remove it by Friday.He's done all of these things, not on a wave of the public loving his agenda, but he's done them instead of helping even his own voters.with the cost of living and the things they're stressed about.

As for the war that he began, that war is deeply unpopular, but it's also causing gas prices to surge.On that, he says he's, quote, bored.When it comes to the deeply unpopular, quite possibly illegal $1 .8 billion slush fund to aid his allies, It's a slush fund that even members of his own party object to.He's now contradicted his own acting attorney general and will not assert whether or not it is alive or dead.He calls it, quote, beautiful.The fund's future is so unclear that Congress is now trying to formally kill it.

The Senate today voted on a motion that would permanently ban the fund's existence.Republicans killed that legislation, not because they want to save the fund, but because of other procedural things.Meanwhile, Trump's approval rating has reached a new low amid all this.The latest YouGov economist poll finds Trump's approval rating at 35 percent.His disapproval is at a whopping 61 percent.This is the lowest it's ever been.

approval rating of any president since the survey existed, started to exist in 2009.Trump focusing more on himself than the American people.It's where we begin the hour with Democratic Senator Elissa Slotkin of Michigan.She's a member of both the Homeland Security and Armed Services Committees.Senator, I'm embarrassed that that was the news that we had to contend with today.But we don't make up the news.

What do you make of where we are?

I mean, yeah, that was quite an intro.I mean, I think, look, I mean, I think What's been interesting is to watch my Republican colleagues, I think, start to get the message.a little bit, that aligning yourself every moment of every day with Donald Trump is not a path to victory for you, for your legacy, for the country.And I think this weaponization fund vote, you alluded to it, you know, where the president was trying to put $1 .8 billion of taxpayer dollars in a special fund that he controlled to decide who should listen to the courts, who has been aggrieved.I think it hit this wall with the Republicans that I think is important.But it fits into a bigger narrative of the president just feeling like, He doesn't have to follow the rules.

His people don't have to follow the rules.He can do whatever he wants, regardless of our tradition and our democracy.And I think, you know, you get absurd introductions, no offense, like that, when you hit kind of a new low with this level of activity coming from the White House.

I mean, no offense taken, but I do feel like I participatedthe sanewashing, right?I said, grab him in the bleep for years.If we'd said what he really said, I don't know that as many women would have voted for him in 16, and I'll never know.I was one of the first people to stop platforming his live events.I still have a very hard time taking his live events because he lies the whole time.

I mean, where do you stand in terms of how much you think people need to know about, let's just take the corruption?I mean, it started with the Qatari jet.It sort of was ushered in formally with the crypto grift, there is now, as you just articulated, a plan to take $1 .8 billion taxpayer dollars and give them to people up to and including violent insurrectionists.

Yeah, I mean, I think, look, we've seen around the world that corruption eventually, when it seeps down into the meat and people feel it in their own lives, they respond.That was the narrative on what happened in Hungary, where they got rid of their president, who had been corrupt for 12 years.And it was interesting.Hungary is an interesting example for us to look at, because the deal that Viktor Orban offered the Hungarian people was, look, leave alone my corruption at the high levels, leave alone my threats to democracy.If I fire a university leader here or curb the media there, leave it alone, because I'm going to make your economy better.I'm going to put more money in your pocket.

That was the trade.And it worked for a while.And then it didn't.And it didn't because the corruption seeped so deep that you couldn't build a bridge in rural Hungary without paying someone off.It didn't work when the, you know, the best friends, the eccentric billionaire best friends of the president of Hungary started doing whatever they wanted and treating Hungary as like the cow that they could milk.And it didn't work when he precipitated false threats and tried to do whatever he wanted.

bring in the security forces at the very end to prevent him from losing.I think that's a very interesting example.And you see certainly whispers of that same thing going on here in the United States.

Yeah, I mean, that same poll that has his approval rating at a record low has his approval in the economy.even lower.Americans' views on the economy, 76 percent say it's poor or fair, just 20 percent say it's good or excellent.What are you hearing from your constituents in terms of their economic concerns?

Yeah, I mean, look, a year ago, you know, the president said, I'm going to come in, I'm going to change your life.And he ran on that.And look, I'll give it to him.He shellacked Democrats in 2024 with the very simple message that his priority was putting more money in your pocket.Whether he was ever truthful about that or not, that's what he ran on.And Democrats had too many priorities.

We had every priority.And so no one knew what we'd really go to the mats on.And so Trump won my state and he won the country.Fast forward a year later, and frankly, before the war, I would say the only cost in a family's life that had gone down under President Trump had been gas, price of gas, right?Not housing, not health care, not groceries, not trips, services.And now every single American is paying the price of this war, of his war, and particularly of feeling that, you know, they see the price of gas 20 times when they drive to work.

So it could not be more clear that people are suffering.Especially in my state and they're feeling like that being in the middle class is like a dream that their parents got to accomplish But not them.So I think that that Even if people are sometimes reluctant to say that they regret their vote or they're switching sides or the whatever that they in their hearts They can't say with a straight face that they are better off under Donald Trump I have to ask you because of your years of service

your reaction to Bill Pulte being given a third job in the Trump administration.He will, I think at the end of this month, become the acting director of national intelligence.

Yeah, I have pretty fundamental problems with Bill Pulte becoming the director of national intelligence or acting director of national intelligence.As someone who helped start that office, I was one of the first 10 employees when, frankly, under the Bush administration, it was set up.And number one, he has no national security experience.We can't even figure out if he's ever handled classified information, if he has a security clearance whatsoever.So he's never dealt with sensitive issues of national security.But number two, much more importantly, is that he has shown in his current job that he has zero qualms taking an order from Trump to go into the personal records of American citizens and dig up false claims, let's say in this case on mortgage fraud.

He's done it against Adam Schiff, Tish James, Lisa Cook.So he has shown not only an interest, but a willingness to actually use his job on the to manipulate information, to do the bidding of Donald Trump, to weaponize the government against people.So if you take that example, proven, and you overlay that, you take that to the DNI's office, with all the access to classified information, our most sensitive tools, it should send a shiver down the spine of anyone who gives a crap about national security and about the personal privacy of American citizens.And as someone who You know, the president tried to criminally indict over a 90 -second video.You know, I've had the government weaponized against me.The idea of someone like that in charge of all of our, you know, 17 different intelligence agencies is just disturbing.

I heard the president backtracking on this because even my Republican colleagues are not on board.