Trump blames vandals for peeling $16M Reflecting Pool — but his own motorcade drove across the wet paint weeks earlier
Getty Images, NBC
Just weeks before President Donald Trump blamed knife-wielding vandals for the peeling paint at the newly renovated Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, his own motorcade drove straight across it.
On May 7, Trump visited the drained pool to inspect the fresh “American Flag Blue” coating he had ordered. To get there, his motorcade, including the roughly 20,000-pound presidential limousine and armored SUVs, rolled across the pool floor while the new surface was still being applied. The moment was captured by multiple outlets, and White House Director of Communications Steven Cheung posted a video of the motorcade with the caption “they see me rolling!” (1)
NBC footage shows the vehicles crossing a seemingly wet patch and leaving tire marks behind (2).
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A month later, the renovation is a mess. Algae has tinted the water green, chunks of blue coating are peeling off and floating to the surface, and Trump has said the pool will likely need to be drained again for repairs (3).
Trump says it was vandalism. He has claimed that someone cut a “350-foot slit” into the pool lining with “a box-cutter or a knife of some kind (4).” Experts point to something more mundane.
A rushed job, not a knife
The blue material is polyurea, a fast-curing coating often used to seal pools. To bond properly, each layer typically needs to be applied within cascading 24-hour windows. On a renovation compressed into roughly eight weeks to hit a July 4 deadline, specialists told Scientific American (5) the coating may not have been applied well enough to hold.
Scientific American also reported that the pool floor may have been stressed by the heavy equipment, trucks and the presidential motorcade that crossed it while the coating was being applied. Polyurea isn’t designed to be driven over, and photos show vehicles parked on painted sections.
Read More: Here are 5 fixed costs Americans constantly overpay for. How many are sabotaging your budget?
No public engineering analysis has tied the motorcade to the failure. The National Park Service has since said in a court filing (6) that a section of the liner was cut with a sharp knife or razor on June 9 — but the agency stopped short of calling it vandalism or naming anyone, and the reported cut doesn’t account for the algae or the paint peeling across the pool’s floor. The most probable explanation experts cite is simply inadequate surface preparation, the coating not sticking to what was underneath it.
Trump’s own earlier sales pitch undercuts the claim. On May 4, he praised the coating’s durability (7): “if you had a knife, you can’t even cut it. So strong, so powerful. It’s like powerful rubber.” Weeks later, he said vandals had cut it “very violently (4).”
Press secretary Karoline Leavitt is doubling down on this framing, fresh off her maternity leave.
What it means for your money
The renovation was a no-bid contract (8). Trump said he’d been quoted $300 million to replace the pool’s granite and pegged his own fix at “a million and a half to two million dollars.” The paint contract to Atlantic Industrial Coatings has since reached $14.65 million. A separate $1.74 million contract went to Green Water Solutions for the algae-killing filtration system. That brings the total above $16 million in taxpayer funds across two contracts, and the bill for the latest repairs hasn’t been disclosed.
A nonprofit, the Cultural Landscape Foundation, sued in May (6) to halt the work, arguing the administration skipped the federal consultation process required before a project like this.
Homeowners hit a smaller version of this constantly. A renovation meant to fix one thing spawns three more — and the costs spiral the same way. This time, it appears taxpayers can look forward to footing the spiralling costs.
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Article Sources
We rely only on vetted sources and credible third-party reporting. For details, see our ethics and guidelines.
X (1); YouTube (2); The Washington Post (3); The Hill (4); Scientific American (5); PBS (6); FactCheck.org (7); PolitiFact (8)
This article originally appeared on Moneywise.com under the title: Trump blames vandals for peeling $16M Reflecting Pool — but his own motorcade drove across the wet paint weeks earlier
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