Tourists in Washington, D.C. are taking special pains to make sure a visit to the Reflecting Pool at the Lincoln Memorial is on their list.
The ongoing saga of the Reflecting Pool’s Trump-driven facelift has resulted in a murky green pool with paint lifting off the bottom in large sheets, revealing the bare concrete underneath.
MAGA conspiracy theorists have claimed the damage is due to “leftists” sabotaging the landmark’s Trump makeover, with theories ranging from late-night fertilizer dumps to broad daylight paint stripping.
But visitors have reported seeing chunks of the paint peeling off and rising to the surface without any help from organized gangs of Trump-hating boogeymen. The Washington Post reported that a worker approached to fish out one such sheet of paint on Thursday, telling the newspaper’s photographer not to take pictures of it.
A man who was making food deliveries in the area told The New York Times he’d stopped by to take a look at the pool’s renovations and saw a small chip of paint floating in the water, which he pulled out to feel.
CNN reported Saturday that visitors to the site were peeling off strips to keep as mementos. Those that have made the trip aren’t impressed by the spectacle.
“It looks pretty gross. I’ve taken about like 20 pictures already, especially of the people cleaning it, because I don’t know if I’ll ever see this again in my lifetime,” Qayla Sykes, who visited from Connecticut for a bachelorette party, told CNN. “Hopefully not.”
Kevin Stout told Fox 5 he “had to see for myself. I couldn’t believe it, that there was algae. Then [there were] people trying to clean it like a swimming pool.”
While Kavan Hicks said the pool “looks disgusting. It looks green, like vomit. We spent all this money to get it blue and look at it,” Fox 5 reported.
“Of course we had to stop by and see what everyone is talking about,” Trey Quealy told The New York Times.
He said he hadn’t noticed problems with the pool on his many previous visits. “I thought it looked great,” he said. “I would not have thought it was a necessary change.”
“Well I have a 6-month-old and when he poops green, this is what it looks like,” another visitor told CBS News.
President Donald Trump, 80, relentlessly pushed his changes to the Reflecting Pool, boasting about the speed and cost of the renovations.
The no-bid contract went to Trump’s “pool guy,” and blew out from $1.8 million to over $14 million.
When the pool turned green less than a week after it was filled, Trump claimed the algae was residual and would quickly clear up.
Workers dumped bottle after bottle of hydrogen peroxide into the water, prompting concerns for the families of ducks that call the area home.
For the past few days workers have been in the pool daily sucking up algae and trying to quell its spread. But the conditions in the city this time of year are ripe for an algal bloom, and scientists say it is to be expected, while Trump’s blue paint job also warmed the water temperature and contributed to the excess algae.
Despite all this, the Department of Interior’s X account has been posting that the Reflecting Pool is better than before.
“All D.C. needed was @POTUS,” the account posted on Thursday, with images of the pool it said were from the Obama administration and then pristine pictures it attributed to Trump.
The White House, Department of Interior, and National Parks Service did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
