Trump all but dares vandals to damage his refilled Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool
In a rambling and ranting Truth Social post Monday, President Donald Trump said the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool is now “70% filled with water and looking good” — and warned that anyone who damages it “will GO TO JAIL.”
Even though federal prosecutors appointed by Trump himself have told a court that the pool’s lining the first go-round was ruined by a botched installation — and not by humans looking to cause havoc — the president threatened the imaginary vandals in a post in which he continued to insist that previous damage to the lining his hand-picked contractor attempted to install last spring was real.
He also attacked the Justice Department’s admission that it was contractor error as “the ridiculous writings of some Radical Left person in the D.C. U.S. Attorney’s Office who got it wrong and obviously didn’t investigate, witness, or see the attached tape,” referencing a segment on Fox News host Jesse Watters’ eponymous show, a clip of which he included with the social media missive.
Trump also repeated a dubious claim that someone had poisoned the grass on the Mall to spell out “86 47” — slang for removing the 47th president, or, in his interpretation, a call to assassination — in letters “90 feet tall and encompassing the width of the entire Park,” and said that grass has since been replaced.
He offered no evidence for that claim, and the 65-second video attached to the post did not appear to show it.
Much of the National Mall’s grass surface has needed repair in recent months, but those repairs were necessitated by damage caused by structures erected for the president’s “Great American State Fair” earlier this year.
Trump continued to suggest that the pool’s problems predated his renovation.
“Interestingly, the Reflecting Pool has not worked properly since it was built in 1922 — It always leaked! This will be different, but any Vandals that try to prove the point otherwise, will GO TO JAIL!” he wrote. “We are watching very closely, and security cameras have been installed.”
Washington, D.C. US Attorney Jeanine Pirro — herself a former Fox presenter — brought the only criminal case over the damage in July, when it accused David Hearn, a 67-year-old former Olympic canoeist, of “forcefully and violently” ripping out the liner.
Within weeks prosecutors had dropped the charges and conceded in a court filing that the “American flag blue” coating Trump requested had started peeling “almost immediately” after it went on.
The Interior Department, they wrote, had “provided less than fulsome information at the outset of this case,” and it was only after Hearn was indicted that the agency determined the “damage was the result of a botched installation and not vandalism.”
Trump responded by publicly urging Pirro to “revisit her hastily made decision.” A judge then blocked prosecutors from charging Hearn a second time, citing the likelihood of “political pressure” from the president, and earlier this month D.C. Superior Court Judge Todd Edelman threw the case out for good, describing the prospect of another prosecution as “simply fanciful.”
Earlier this month, Trump told reporters the work on the famous water feature was almost — finally — finished.
“I think they’re going to fill it up this week. The Reflecting Pool is totally complete, and we changed the old pipes,” he said. “We wanted to get open for July Fourth, and now we went and got rid of all of the old pipes, which we were going to do later during the winter.
