President Donald Trump has sought to blame his botched Reflecting Pool renovations on unidentified saboteurs he claims entered the pool with a box cutter and began slicing it up.
The 80-year-old president insisted on Monday that the collapse of his much-hyped project wasn’t the result of bad planning, questionable contracting, or a giant blue-painted basin baking in Washington’s summer heat.
Instead, he claims vandals entered the iconic Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool and sliced a massive gash into its new lining.
What’s more, Trump says he has proof—he just won’t show anybody.
“We have, I think, a 290- or 300-foot slit right through it, from probably a box cutter or a knife of some kind,” he told reporters in the Oval Office on Monday.
“We had people lifting up... some of the [pool]. It’s not a lot of damage, but we’ll probably have to let the water out and refix it… Who would think somebody would go into a pool and take a knife and start cutting it?”
Trump said that five people had been arrested so far and that he had seen the evidence of the vandalism himself. But when pressed on whether he would release the evidence, he demurred.
Despite Trump’s claims of a massive gash, it is not visible—if it exists at all—by walking the perimeter of the Reflecting Pool, as the Daily Beast did on Monday.
“When you have a 350-foot slit... you think that’s proof?” he said, suddenly changing the original size of the damage.
“All you have to do is see the Parks Department; they’ll show it to you. See, ugh, the Secretary.
“But I saw it. They cut it. They cut it very violently. The same thing with the floor. They cut it, and then they lifted it, and they pulled it. And that’s what it is.”
The Daily Beast has reached out to the National Park Service and the Interior Department, run by Secretary Doug Burgum, asking for the evidence, but has yet to hear back.
The wild story was outlined in the Oval Office, where Trump signed a pair of executive orders aimed at speeding the development of advanced quantum computers.
The renovation of the pool was controversial, partly because it was awarded as a no-bid contract to a Virginia-based company that had previously worked on a swimming pool at one of the president’s golf clubs.
But the makeover has since been derailed by two major issues: a bright green algae bloom and the peeling of the pool’s new, controversial “American Flag Blue”-tinted coating.
Trump spent weeks bragging about the renovation, which has now cost taxpayers about $14.5 million.
At one point, the president even traveled to Wisconsin for the first time since the 2024 election to speak to struggling farmers, only to veer off into a long-winded tangent about the project. He even brought them “before and after” pictures.
“Look at that!” he said as polite farmers examined the images. “That’s our nation’s capital.”
Crews have since been frantically working to remove algae from the pool, including by pouring hydrogen peroxide into it. But the bleaching agent only made things worse.
The president has nevertheless escalated the rhetoric dramatically, warning that anyone caught damaging the pool could face up to 10 years in prison. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro has similarly vowed to pursue aggressive prosecutions of alleged vandals.
Meanwhile, the administration’s response has begun to resemble a security operation. National Guard troops, U.S. Park Police, U.S. Marshals, and other law enforcement personnel have descended on the National Mall as authorities hunt for supposed pool saboteurs.
The Daily Beast visited the pool on Monday and saw one woman detained, searched, and questioned simply for sitting near the water with her hand in the pool before being released.
Another person swept up in the crackdown was former U.S. Olympian David Hearn, who says he was arrested after touching a loose section of the deteriorating liner out of curiosity.
Pressed on the money spent on the project—when he originally claimed it would be done for a fraction of the cost—Trump returned to familiar territory.
“Barack Hussein Obama, have you ever heard of him?” he replied.
“Yeah, he spent two years and over $100 million on trying to fix it. You know what happened to it? Never even opened. He took the water from the river, you know about that, right? It turned out to be putrid, and it destroyed the whole thing.”
