Trump’s overlooked new scandal might be the most revealing yet.

Among the approximately 1.776 billion scandals of this Trump administration, one has recently stood out to me: the ongoing boondoggle at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. What was supposed to be a minor maintenance project has somehow become one of the purest reflections of Trump-era governance, involving a no-bid contract, a golf-club manager from New Jersey, and the color “American Flag Blue.”

Much of this is known only because of the dogged investigative journalism from David A. Fahrenthold, who has spent years following the money around Donald Trump and his orbit for the New York Times. He has devoted a surprising amount of time and energy into relaying the minute engineering problems plaguing this shallow pool on the National Mall. Fahrenthold—famous for breaking the existence of Trump’s Access Hollywood tape, and for his Pulitzer Prize–winning reporting on Trump’s reputed charitable giving—agreed to talk to me about his slow-burn reporting on the pool and what it reveals. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Aymann Ismail: Let’s start at the beginning. How did you get so focused on the reflecting pool?

David A. Fahrenthold: Our original focus was no-bid contracts. We had already done a couple of stories about contracts that went to the company that planned the Jan. 6 rally in 2021 and the people renovating Lafayette Park. We knew that the Reflecting Pool work was going on because Trump had talked about it so much. So we started looking into it: Is this a no-bid contract? What did Trump say about it? Who is the company behind it? What was remarkable was that at every step, as you peeled back another layer, something wasn’t quite what it was supposed to be or what Trump had said it was. It seemed as if it should have been a simple job. But every step made it more interesting.

Was anyone skeptical that this was the story to drill down on?

Well, it helped that Trump had made such a big deal out of it. He had said, in effect: “I found this contractor myself. He worked on the pool at my golf club.” Even if that had been 100 percent true, and all of our reporting had borne that out, that alone would have been interesting: The president’s pool guy is renovating the Reflecting Pool. I didn’t have to sell it very hard. Once we started reporting, we found all these ways in which his account didn’t seem to square with reality. We realized, Wait, it’s not actually a pool guy. And then all these other things the president had said about it turned out not to be true.

How did the story unfold as you were reporting it?

This is a personal philosophy, and not everybody agrees with it, but I think especially in the Trump era, the best way to tell an investigative story is a little bit at a time, iteratively. There are so many news stories happening at once that it’s risky to say, “I’m going to write one big story, and I’m going to publish it on this day.” Then you have to hope that nothing else crazy is happening on that day and people have time to sit down and read it.

When you write these stories a little bit at a time, you give them more chances to find people. Then, if people get interested, they can go back and read everything else you’ve written. And once you’ve established in people’s minds, “OK, this is an interesting story and I’m following it,” each new detail feels manageable. It doesn’t feel to the reader like, “Oh my God, I have to sit down and read this whole long saga.” It’s more like: “I’m interested, and now I’m going to read about the next little turn of the screw.” That’s easier than asking people to commit to something very long all at once.

As a reporter, you put the story out there, and you’re basically saying: Look, everybody, I’m interested in this topic. If you know something, come find me. You can find people who know something from the inside—or people who are experts in a very obscure topic, like reflecting pools, will come forward and say, “Actually, there’s something you’re missing here. There’s an important piece in plain sight that you should be looking at.”

I don’t even know how to introduce the concept of “American Flag Blue.”

We found things out in pieces. First, he’s not Trump’s pool guy. He’s not anybody’s pool guy. It’s a company that, as far as I can tell, doesn’t do swimming pools. They coat highway culverts. They work on fuel tanks and roofs and things like that, but they are not a swimming pool company at all. And as far as I can tell, they have never worked for any of Trump’s pool companies.

Then we looked at the contract. It was a no-bid contract for this job, given to a company that had not done anything like this before. It certainly had never done a federal contract of any kind before. And then there’s what the company’s actually doing to the Reflecting Pool. There are two things: One is something people have said for a long time the pool needs, that somebody has to fill in the spaces between the concrete slabs to make sure they don’t leak. The other thing—the much better-known thing—is that they’re putting a waterproofing coating down at the bottom of the pool. There’s a tint in the waterproofing, and Trump says he chose the color himself: American Flag Blue.

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

That part—putting the waterproofing on the pool—may not hurt. But it’s certainly not anything anybody had said was going to help. The slabs at the bottom of the pool are 8 inches of concrete. If water is leaking through 8 inches of concrete, it’s not very much. Nobody had ever said that this was the problem that needed fixing. But all of a sudden, the Trump administration decided, This is something we need to do, and we need to spend millions of dollars to do it.

What do you make of the “pool guy” claim?

It’s interesting because, at the beginning of this story, Trump said, essentially, “I picked my pool guy to fix the Reflecting Pool.” That raises all kinds of questions about conflicts of interest. Is that guy going to give him a free pool the next time he resurfaces the pool at a Trump golf club because he got this big contract? But then you’re in this position where Trump says something that sounds as if he’s admitting to something that could create a conflict of interest. Then, the first story we did, we’re like: Wait, this may not be his pool guy. I couldn’t find evidence that it was his pool guy. So I’m trying to fact-check Trump on Trump’s own admission of a conflict of interest that may not exist. I don’t think that was a common thing in reporting on presidents in the past. Finding the truth, in that case, was maybe something that makes Trump look better than Trump’s own account of what happened, which is so surreal.

You mentioned that in the Trump era, it can be better to let these stories come out incrementally, because there are always bigger stories happening and you don’t want yours to get lost. You’re also the person who broke the Access Hollywood tape. You know the impact of the larger stories. How did you get to the philosophy you’re following now?

There are a lot of people at the New York Times writing pieces that involve much more money and much bigger federal spending programs. And that may be me someday too.

But there are a couple of reasons I find these stories really interesting. One is that they clearly matter to the president. He talks about these projects all the time. He posts about them. His administration has gotten very invested in this Reflecting Pool project in particular. It clearly matters a great deal to him. He talks about it almost more than he talks about some much bigger problems he faces. If it matters to Trump, it ought to matter to us.

The other thing is that it takes a larger narrative—in this case no-bid contracts—and narrows it down to something readers can understand. The bigger issue is the administration giving out contracts without the kind of competition you’re supposed to have, the competition that helps find the best contractor for the best price. That can feel abstract. But the Reflecting Pool makes it tangible. Readers have seen the Reflecting Pool. Many of them have been there. They know what it is and what it ought to look like. So this is a federal project they can understand. They can understand that it will be different now because it’s painted blue. In that way, the pool encapsulates this much bigger, more abstract issue in something readers can easily envision.

How would you encapsulate those bigger issues?

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The reason I like writing about it is that I do think it’s emblematic of this willingness inside the Trump administration to shoot from the hip. They chose a company that apparently had no experience doing this job. They’re disregarding expert opinions. They’re not letting people compete to see if there’s somebody else who could do it better or more cheaply. They’re just jumping right into this thing. And they’re doing it in a rush, in this case because they want to get it done before July 4. How many other things have we seen that follow that kind of pattern but are much bigger and more important than the Reflecting Pool? The Iran war could be a good parallel to that.

If the Reflecting Pool contract goes bad, what happens? The pool leaks a little bit. There’s algae. It’s not that different from the status quo Trump inherited. But you can tell, in that situation, how they got themselves into this easily avoidable problem. And you can see their decisionmaking approach to a million other things that are much more important.

We’re not talking about the impact on the international economy from putting tariffs in place. We’re not talking about the complex Middle Eastern diplomacy involved in starting a war with Iran. But you can still discern the same rush, the same eagerness to assume that everything is going to turn out great without taking many steps to make sure that it does.

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Where do you think your reporting goes from here?

There are a lot of other things happening on the mall and around Washington to beautify the capital before July 4. And even though we’re so close to it, they’re still starting new projects. So we’re going to try to do more reporting about the pool, and also more writing about no-bid contracts around D.C. and how much the government is spending.

But there is still the much bigger issue of giving out contracts without competition—sometimes to companies that have some connection to Trump. That is bigger than this story, and in some places it involves much more money. My hope is that after July 4, once we’ve seen how this Washington makeover ends, we can look at some bigger stories that have the same contours.

Are you going to the UFC cage match on Trump’s birthday?

I was not invited. But if they invited me, I might go.

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