President Donald Trump has gone on a bizarre rant after his excuse for the green-slime disaster at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool took a turn for the worse in court.
The 80-year-old president continued to push his own version of events, taking to Truth Social to lash out at his own appointee, U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro, after she said Trump’s $16 million renovation failed not because of “vandals,” but due to a “flawed installation by the contractors.”
“I disagree 100% with Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, on the Reflecting Pool,” Trump wrote on Saturday.
Trump then repeated his baseless claims that vandalism ruined the pool.
“I don’t know what she was thinking?” he said of Pirro. “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.”
The post comes a day after Pirro dismissed charges against Olympic canoeist David Hearn, 67, whom federal prosecutors accused of vandalizing the pool. Prosecutors claimed that the Department of the Interior failed to fully and accurately disclose information showing that contractor errors, not vandalism, were responsible for the damage.
In his post, Trump acknowledged that “there may have been some contractor difficulty,” but insisted that “the major damage was caused by VANDALS!”
Pirro had previously echoed Trump’s claims, saying there was “tremendous evidence” that Hearn had vandalized the pool. However, in Friday’s filing, she instead blamed the damage on a rushed renovation schedule, arguing that Trump’s insistence on completing the project in time for the nation’s 250th anniversary celebrations on July 4 contributed to significant construction failures.
“The rush to complete the project led to hasty and botched work that was not remediated before the project was finished and the fencing removed,” she wrote.
The contractor in question, Atlantic Industrial Coatings, was awarded a no-bid contract for the renovation of the pool after Trump said he had used the company before for work at one of his golf resorts.
Trump initially estimated the project—to redo the bottom so that the water would appear “American Flag Blue”—would cost no more than $1.8 million, but the final bill has since soared past $16 million and is still climbing, while the pool’s once-blue bottom has already lost its color.
The pool was drained in June, so crews could apply the new coating. When the water was returned, so did algae blooms that required hydrogen peroxide treatments. Sheets of paint also peeled off the surface.
Hearn was arrested on June 19 after stopping to inspect the troubled pool during a 52-mile bike ride. Prosecutors accused him of damaging government property, but Hearn insisted he was simply looking at the renovation gone wrong, saying he had only examined loose material that was already coming away from the surface and had no role in the damage.
The president has continued to repeat claims about vandals cutting a slit of up to 350 feet into the Reflecting Pool (which he later amended to 300 yards of damage)—saying at various times the unknown sick” and “terrible” culprits used a knife, a box cutter, and a razor.
Trump’s defense of the troubled project comes as The New York Times reporter and co-author of Regime Change, a revealing book on the president, Maggie Haberman, has suggested that renovations and construction projects occupy roughly “seventy percent” of Trump’s attention.
At the time of Trump’s Saturday post, the Reflecting Pool sat empty for the second time in three months, as crews once again drained the troubled landmark amid the fallout from the renovation fiasco.
