Recommendations of the Editorial team
Donald Trump has once again staged an episode on social media – just before an important state visit to China. The president posted dozens of times on Truth Social overnight and into Tuesday morning: he railed against prominent Democrats like Barack Obama and Joe Biden, spread false claims about the 2020 election, fantasized himself on the $100 bill – and delivered a number of other bizarre posts.
Trump also drummed up support for his latest pet project: the renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. “Democrats Love Sewage” read one post with an AI-generated image showing Obama, Biden and Nancy Pelosi in a filthy, sewage-covered reflecting pool. In another post, he launched into a lengthy tirade against the New York Times for its coverage of the project, particularly an article published on Monday that said the project will cost taxpayers many times what Trump had promised.
“This is not a mere veneer, as the vile NYT ‘reporter’ David Fahrenthold so inaccurately and maliciously claimed – this is a highly complex work of intelligent and beautiful engineering,” the president wrote. He previously claimed that “many patriots” had asked him to clean up the Reflecting Pool, which he said had become “a disgrace to Washington, DC, and to our country” due to mismanagement by Obama and Biden.
“I didn’t award the contract, the ‘Department of the Interior’ did, to a contractor I didn’t know and had never used before,” Trump concluded – even though he himself had previously claimed to have chosen the contractor because it was working on the swimming pool at one of his golf clubs.
Cost explosion for the reflecting pool
The Times reported Monday that while Trump had said the contractor was only asking $1.8 million to remodel the pool and paint its floor blue, the Interior Department doubled the size of the contract last week and now plans to pay the company nearly $14 million. Normally, the government is required to go through a competitive bidding process for contract work, but the Trump administration awarded a direct contract to Atlantic Industrial Coatings, saying the project was too urgent to waste time on a competitive bidding process. In his Truth Social post on Tuesday, Trump wrote that the project would cost “$5 or $6 million” and would be completed in two weeks.
The report was preceded by a separate Times article last week that blasted the narrative Trump has built around the project. The Reflecting Pool project is just one example of how Trump is trampling on traditions – and arguably the law – to reshape the look of Washington to his liking. The article noted that the administration is not fixing problems with the filtration system, that painting the pool floor blue does not solve algae problems, and that Trump’s most recent stunt – his motorcade parade through the drained pool – may have damaged the concrete. The Times also noted that it could not confirm Trump’s claim that Atlantic Industrial Coatings worked on his club’s swimming pools – and that the company does not even advertise that it renovates swimming pools.
Distraction from construction projects
Trump has increasingly burrowed into construction projects such as the Reflecting Pool and White House Ballroom as his approval ratings have plummeted amid an unpopular war on Iran and a cost-of-living crisis at home. On Monday night in the White House Rose Garden – which he also had remodeled – he railed to law enforcement officials about the need for aesthetic renovations. “It was a shithole,” the president said of the White House before he took office. “Now this place is first class.”
