Trump Melts Down Over Reflecting Pool Reports in Wild Posting Spree

Donald Trump had another episode on social media ahead of a critical state visit to China this week. The president posted to Truth Social dozens of times overnight and into Tuesday morning, railing against prominent Democrats like Barack Obama and Joe Biden, pushing false claims about the 2020 election, and imagining himself on the $100 bill, along with several other bizarre posts.

Trump also promoted his latest pet project, refinishing the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. “Democrats Love Sewage,” read one post featuring an AI image of Obama, Biden, and Nancy Pelosi bathing in a fetid Reflecting Pool covered in waste. In another, he wrote a lengthy screed bashing The New York Times for its coverage of the project, particularly a story published Monday about how it’s going to cost taxpayers several times more than what Trump promised.

“This is not just a paint job, like lowlife ‘reporter,’ David Fahrenthold, of the NYT so inaccurately and maliciously stated, it is a deeply complicated work of smart and beautiful construction,” the president wrote, after claiming that “many patriots” had asked him to fix the Reflecting Pool, which he says had been “an embarrassment to Washington, D.C., and to our Country, itself” due to mismanagement by Obama and Biden.

“I didn’t give out the contract, ‘Interior’ did, to a contractor I did not know, and have never used before,” Trump concluded, despite having previously claimed that he selected the contractor because they had worked on the swimming pool at one of his golf clubs.

The Times reported on Monday that though Trump said the contractor was only charging the government $1.8 million to redo to the pool and paint its bottom blue, the Interior Department last week doubled the size of the contract and now planned to pay the company nearly $14 million. The government is typically required to hold a competitive bidding projects for contract work, but the Trump administration gave Atlantic Industrial Coatings a no-bid contract to renovate the pool, arguing that the project was too urgent to waste time with a bidding process. Trump wrote in his Truth Social post on Tuesday that the project would cost “5 or 6 Million Dollars” and be done in two weeks.

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The report followed a separate Times piece published last week poking holes in the narrative Trump is pushing about the project, which is only one example of the ways in which he is flouting tradition — and arguably, the law — to overhaul the aesthetic of Washington, D.C., in his image. The piece pointed out that the administration is not addressing issues with its filtration system, that painting the bottom blue will not solve any algae problems, and that Trump’s recent stunt driving his motorcade across the drained pool could have caused damage to the concrete. The Times also noted that it could not confirm that Atlantic Industrial Coatings worked on the swimming pools at Trump’s club, like Trump claimed, and that the company does not even advertise that it does work on swimming pools.

Trump has increasingly occupied with building projects like the Reflecting Pool and the White House ballroom as his approval has cratered amid an unpopular war against Iran and a cost-of-living crisis at home. He ranted about the need for aesthetic renovations while speaking to law enforcement officials on Monday night at the White House Rose Garden, which he has also renovated. “It was a shit house,” the president of the White House before he took office. “This place is tippy-top now.”