Anyone who vandalizes Donald Trump’s Reflecting Pool should be forced to sell their homes, cars, and even pets to pay for repairs, one MAGA congressman said.
Texas Republican Troy Nehls has parroted the 80-year-old president’s narrative that recent issues with the Reflecting Pool were caused not by the hasty $16 million renovation that he ordered, but by nefarious saboteurs conspiring against him to damage his pet project.
With chunks of blue sealant peeling off from the bottom of the pool and algae turning the water green, Trump has claimed vandals with “razor blades and knives” are responsible and has grown so angry that he ordered the pool be drained for a second round of renovations.
To pay for the second Trump-ordered renovation, Rep. Nehls told TMZ that the imaginary vandals should sell off all their belongings.
“I would take their homes, if they have a home, if they have a car. Hell, if they have a dog,” a visibly angry Nehls said. “I’d make them sell everything to fix it.”
“Absolutely,” he added.
Elected Republicans and conservative media outlets, including Fox News, have largely fallen in line with Trump’s baseless claim that the Reflecting Pool has been sabotaged.
Trump has tried to blame the disastrous renovation on anonymous “leftist” vandals, claiming they have committed very serious crimes and will spend “years in jail!”
He has claimed that these made-up vandals used a “knife or blade” to tear a “gash” into the pool’s sealant. His description of the alleged gash has gone from 250 feet to 300 feet to 350 feet.
“It was purposefully and criminally done, and somebody had to work very hard, probably in the dark of night,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Tuesday.
Neither the president nor the White House has provided any substantial evidence of the apparent gash.
The New York Times reported that Trump’s “vandals” narrative is even at odds with reports from his own government.
Internal documents reviewed by The Times found that two National Park Service workers did indeed find two small cuts within the foam lining the pool’s expansion joints, but that those cuts were entirely unrelated to the “American flag blue” paint coating that has been floating up to the water’s surface.
It also said that the cuts were unrelated to the blooming algae problem.
