Fresh photographs have revealed the sheer scale of Donald Trump’s latest vanity project disaster.
The president, who turned 80 last weekend, spent months promising to recoat the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in his chosen “American flag blue.” The work wrapped earlier this month. Within a day, an algal bloom turned the water a sickly shade of green.
Satellite imagery shows algae levels higher than in any June over the past five years, according to the Washington Post.
Workers have already spent days vacuuming the slime out and pouring hydrogen peroxide into the basin to kill the bloom.
The pool holds about 6.5 million gallons of water across upward of 300,000 square feet. By Thursday, around half the surface water remained green.
The final bill for Trump’s work on the pool came to around $14 million. That was nearly eight times Trump’s original $1.8 million projection. The project was meant to only take a week, but it stretched out to nearly two months.
The project drew fresh scrutiny on Thursday when the New York Times reported that Greenwater Services—the Ohio firm hired to install the pool’s water-purification system—is owned by a trust led by John J. Cafaro, a longtime Trump donor who has twice pleaded guilty to felonies.
Trump has called Cafaro a “fantastic man,” the Times reported.
He keeps a mansion in Palm Beach, not far from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago. He pleaded guilty in 2001 to conspiring to bribe former Rep. Jim Traficant of Ohio and was sentenced to probation.
The $10,000 “loan” that propped up his daughter Capri Cafaro’s failed 2004 congressional bid surfaced years later. He pleaded guilty in 2010 to a felony false-statement charge related to it, served five days in jail, and was fined $250,000 and placed on three years’ probation.
The National Park Service awarded Greenwater the $1.7 million contract directly, without the open competition agencies normally must run, the Times reported. Since 2016, Cafaro has given more than $300,000 to political committees backing the president.
Department of the Interior spokeswoman Katie Martin said the agency had no idea about Cafaro’s political ties and chose Greenwater because it “had the expertise, work force and materials” to finish on time, she told the Times. Both the Department of the Interior and the White House said Trump played no part in choosing the firm.
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House, the Department of the Interior, and Greenwater Services for comment on this story.
An Interior Department spokesperson previously defended the ongoing efforts to clean the pool while praising the president’s multimillion-dollar renovation.
“The nanobubbler technology has successfully destroyed the algae bloom that has plagued every pool reopening since 1922, most infamously, the Obama pool reopening that resulted in massive algae clumps taking over the pool’s surface following years of construction that cost taxpayers millions upon millions only to be broken and disgusting days later,” the spokesperson said in a statement.
“Now, due to deploying the advanced nanobubbler technology, the algae is dead and being vacuumed up as we speak,” the department added.
In response to the Daily Beast’s follow-up about the use of hydrogen peroxide, the Interior Department provided another statement that indicated the chemicals were also part of “maintaining” it.
“Additionally, hydrogen peroxide, which is a milder treatment than chlorine and is used in spas and specialty pools like natural swimming pools, is also treating the pool,” the spokesperson said. “There are no harmful side effects to marine life or to the environment.”
