Trump Melts Down Over Reflecting Pool ‘Paint Job’
President Donald Trump, 79, is losing it over the media coverage of his renovations to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool as construction wraps up.
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The president has been obsessed with the project as workers began refilling the pool on the National Mall this week, despite Trump facing a series of pressing issues, such as the ongoing war in Iran and Americans’ struggles with high costs.
He’s touted a bizarre poster of the pool that compared its size to skyscrapers, held up printout images of it inside the Oval Office at an unrelated event, and even had a staffer pull up a video of it on a laptop on his desk in front of a group of reporters on Thursday, to tout the “clean, beautiful water.”
But on Friday, he melted down over not getting the media coverage he wanted for the project after rambling for weeks about painting it “American Flag Blue.”
“The Great Reflecting Pool, that stretches between The Lincoln Memorial and The Washington Monument, just opened to ‘rave reviews’ but, maliciously or not, some say, like The Washington Post, it was a ‘paint job.’ This was not a paint job,” Trump ranted on Truth Social.
“This was highly sophisticated material, industrial strength, that could last for 100 years, applied by very talented people, many of whom came from the Great State of Oklahoma, where I won 77 out of 77 Counties, THREE TIMES, the only President to ever do so.”
Trump went on to declare, “The material is thick, strong, flexible, and has a natural, beautiful color, the dark blue of the American Flag!”
The Reflecting Pool has experienced leaks for decades, which Trump has vowed to fix. After construction workers spent weeks painting the bottom of the pool with a dark blue coating, they began refilling it with water on Thursday.
During his Oval Office appearance on Thursday, Trump said it could leak, but then insisted it won’t because the project included resealing the gaps at the bottom of the pool.
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It was not the first time the Trump administration has raged about media coverage of the Reflecting Pool renovations. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum last week melted down at a New York Times report suggesting that previous tests to ensure the pool was not leaking during the renovations had failed.
The report, based on internal documents, noted that it was unclear whether the Interior Department had found a solution to the issues at the time of publication.
Burgum insisted they had fixed the problem in a lengthy series of posts and accused the publication of Trump Derangement Syndrome.
The Trump administration had said in court filings that the pool would begin to be refilled with water no later than Sunday. Construction materials and workers’ vehicles could still be seen in the pool as water slowly began to pour in on Thursday.
Trump first announced the project during an appearance in the Oval Office in April. He suggested the work would cost $1.5 million to $2 million, but records later showed the cost of the contract project exceeded $14 million.
On Thursday, the president also revealed that he wanted to build a promenade on the back of the Lincoln Memorial, extending down to the Potomac River.
It was the latest in a series of projects the president has voluntarily discussed publicly rather than addressing the pressing domestic and foreign policy challenges his administration faces.
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