Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has taken the president’s side in a brewing MAGA feud.
Burgum, 69, vowed that he “won’t back down” in the administration’s ill-fated quest to nail purported perpetrators of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool disaster—even after U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro’s office dropped a case against the lone vandalism suspect.
“The evidence is clear, vandals have repeatedly caused damage to the Reflecting Pool. Some of these acts were even caught on camera,” Burgum insisted in an X post Saturday.
“We also provided the U.S. Attorney’s office expert and eyewitness testimony to the damage done by vandals and provided every piece of evidence they asked for in the requested time line detailing each area of damage at the pool,” he continued.
Burgum stressed that President Donald Trump “cares deeply” about protecting national monuments such as the 103-year-old pool.
“Intentional damage done to the Reflecting Pool is no different than defacing any one of our other national monuments,” he said. “We won’t back down to deranged people who want to destroy, deface, or degrade our monuments.”
Burgum’s statement came just hours after Trump himself lashed out at Pirro for humiliating him in his Reflecting Pool saga.
“I disagree 100% with Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, on the Reflecting Pool. I don’t know what she was thinking?” he pondered out loud on Truth Social.
“To me, it was a pure case of VANDALISM, that included the grass, which had a big 86 47 emblazoned in giant letters on it, and other elements of the surrounding area. There may have been some contractor difficulty, but the major damage was caused by VANDALS!” he raged.
The president was referring to a June incident in which the number 8647 mysteriously appeared on the National Mall, triggering an investigation. In service industry parlance, the number “86” is widely understood to mean expel or get rid of something. Trump, meanwhile, is the 47th president of the United States.
Trump has repeatedly insisted that vandals cut a slit of up to 350 feet—later amended to 300 yards—into the Reflecting Pool. On several occasions, he accused unknown “sick” and “terrible” culprits of using a knife, a box cutter, and a razor.
But the president’s numerous meltdowns about his latest fixation didn’t yield the results he wanted.
On Friday, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia dropped the felony charge of vandalism against Olympic canoeist David Hearn, 67, whom federal prosecutors previously accused of wrecking the Reflecting Pool.
Prosecutors said the Interior Department, led by Burgum, had failed to fully and accurately disclose information showing that contractor errors, not vandalism, were responsible for the damage that earned Trump’s wrath.
“Given all of this newly discovered information, it is difficult to attribute the widespread damage to the Reflecting Pool to vandalism,” Pirro wrote in her motion to the court.
