Trump claims ‘pictures’ show ‘vandals’ cut a 350ft slit in the reflecting pool floor but declines to show evidence
In an entirely predictable development, when Donald Trump was just pressed by reporters to explain the flawed renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, he denied that the contractors he awarded the work to were to blame and instead insisted that “vandals” had used a knife or box-cutter to cut a 350ft “slit” in the newly applied sealant, which started peeling away from the floor and floating to the surface within days of its application.
“I can’t help it if somebody goes in with a knife and starts hacking it up,” the president said.
“They went in there with a knife”, Trump said, repeating a claim he first made on social media. “Five people are arrested and five people are under investigation right now,” the president added, despite the fact that the arrests that have been made appear to be of tourists or curious locals who dipped their hands into the water to collect floating bits of sealant as souvenirs of the failed renovation.
When he was asked, by Ed O’Keefe of CBS News, if he could provide any evidence that vandalism was to blame, Trump first suggested that the parks department could show reporters what he called the long gash in the sealant. Asked if there were photographs or video of vandals in the pool, Trump said “we also have pictures of it”, but said they would be revealed in court at a later date.
Trump then claimed that the growth of algae in the pool was also caused by unseen vandals. Attributing his claim to what “somebody said”, the president told reporters: “They put, somebody said, fertilizer in the water. If you put fertilizer in the water, you get algae. But somebody said they might’ve put fertilizer, they did something to create the algae.”
He went on to say that the water had now been “purified”, apparently a reference to the hydrogen peroxide workers were seen pouring into the pool last week, before at least one duckling was found dead in the water.
Key events
Closing summary
This concludes our live coverage of the second Trump home improvement show administration for the day. Here are the latest developments:
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Vice-president JD Vance is not at all mad about being snubbed by Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, before talks in Switzerland.
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Donald Trump reiterated but declined to share any evidence for his claim that “vandals” had used a knife or box-cutter to cut a 350ft “slit” in the newly applied floor of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, which apparently started peeling away and floating to the surface within days of its application.
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Over a dozen national guard troops and federal officers detained a young woman on Monday for the apparent crime of lifting a small piece of the detached polyurethane floor covering from the surface of the pool’s water.
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Trump announced that his administration is “preparing lawsuits against ABC for false reporting” in its coverage of his baseless claim that “vandals” are responsible for the failure of his botched renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. The legal cause of action is apparently that the broadcaster failed to report his lie that the $35.3 reflecting pool renovation during Barack Obama’s first term cost over $100m.
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Trump revealed that the outgoing UK prime minister, Keir Starmer, failed to take his advice to rip out his nation’s off-shore wind turbines and instead drill for oil.“I think he’s a lovely man, but I said, ‘You’re really messing up energy: you have windmills all over the place’”.
Senator Adam Schiff, the Los Angeles Democrat, has responded on social media to the TMZ video we featured earlier, showing a young woman being detained on Monday by over a dozen national guard troops and federal officers for the apparent crime of reaching into the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool to pick up a piece of the peeling polyurethane floor covering.
“President Trump wasted your tax dollars on a poor paint job for the Reflecting Pool, pouring millions down the drain. Now he’s wasting more money detaining tourists who take a close look at the botched repairs”, Schiff wrote.
Trump says he is suing ABC News for not reporting his lie about cost of Obama-era Reflecting Pool work
Donald Trump announced on Monday that his administration is “preparing lawsuits against ABC for false reporting” in its coverage of his baseless claim that “vandals” are responsible for the failure of his botched renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.
The president made his legal threat shortly after ABC News accurately reported on Monday night that Trump had alleged without any proof that vandals slashed a 350-ft slit in the new polyurethane covering he spent $14m of taxpayer money to cover the reflecting pool’s leaky floor.
According to the president’s social media post, the legal cause of action is apparently that the broadcaster failed to report his lie that the $35.3 reflecting pool renovation during Barack Obama’s first term cost over $100m.
The New York Times reported last month that a plan developed during Trump’s first term to address the reflecting pool’s leaks and its algae problem was inherited by the Biden administration but not implemented because the bids from vendors had been over $100m.
In Trump’s post, the president also complained that ABC News had failed to include two more of his lies in its reporting: his claim that the reflecting pool “was rarely open due to leaks and stench” after the 2012 renovation was complete, which is false, and that Obama and Joe Biden “wanted to spend 300 to 400 Million Dollars” on further renovations of the pool, which is also untrue.
In fact, according to Trump himself, the cost of more than $300m was an estimate provided to his administration before he suggested awarding a no-bid contract to a company he said had worked on a swimming pool at one of his clubs.
On 7 May, after his motorcade drove over the surface of the drained reflecting pool, possibly damaging it, Trump told reproters: “we had estimates to fix it of about $355m and it was going to take three and a half years… So we’re going to be able to do it for about… $1.8m, and it’s going to take one week.”
As he wishes Starmer farewell, Trump says he tried to warn him about the ‘windmills’
Asked on Monday about the resignation of Keir Starmer, the UK prime minister he has been critical of, Donald Trump revealed that his biggest regret is that the Labour leader failed to take his advice to rip out his nation’s off-shore wind turbines and instead drill for oil.
“I think he’s a lovely man, but I said, ‘You’re really messing up energy: you have windmills all over the place, in the meantime you have the North Sea oil and they won’t let anybody drill’, Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Monday, hours after Starmer bowed to the inevitable and stepped down to make way for a more charismatic rival, Andy Burnham.
The 2024 Labour manifesto Starmer’s government was elected to enact did indeed pledge “to double onshore wind, triple solar power, and quadruple offshore wind by 2030” and “not issue new licences to explore new fields” in the North Sea, “because they will not take a penny off bills, cannot make us energy secure, and will only accelerate the worsening climate crisis”.
As the BBC explained last year, Trump’s obsessive hatred for wind turbines, which he calls, mistakenly, windmills, began with his quixotic battle to stop the installation of 11 turbines off the coast of an Aberdeenshire golf course he owns.
In 2015, a week after Trump infamously called for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” at a campaign event, five justices at Britain’s highest court rejected his attempt to prevent the offshore windfarm being built within sight of his golf course.
A decade later, the turbines were visible to reporters who followed Trump to Scotland when, as president, he held a promotional event for a new course at his resort, dedicated to himself.
Trump, or a ghostwriter, tries to explain ‘Team Algae’ protesters at reflecting pool
On his social media platform, Donald Trump, or a ghostwriter with a better sense of grammar, punctuation and history, has criticized “Team Algae”, a handful of left-wing activists who staged an absurdist protest against him over the weekend in Washington DC, by appearing at the edge of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool to cheer for the algae his $14m renovation failed to clear.
The president, or an aide, posted an image of one of the protesters, a woman in an inflatable pink frog costume holding up a banner that read: “First they came for the algae”. The post then noted that the reference in the phrase on the banner is to a famous passage from a speech made by Martin Niemöller, a German Lutheran pastor, in 1946, to lament that he had not spoken up against the Nazis before it was too late.
The post on Trump’s account first suggests that the pro-algae protester is “likely paid”, repeating a familiar claim for which he has presented no evidence, and then notes:
The sign says, “First they came for the algae…” which is in reference to a famous post-WW2 statement about Germans not speaking out against the Nazis:
“…Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”
While the slogan on the banner clearly is a reference to Niemöller’s famous lament, and Trump, or his ghostwriter, might intend to suggest that the protester is making light of the Holocaust, they seem not to realize that invoking Niemöller, who was a political prisoner from from 1937 to 1945, is clearly a way to equate Trump to the Nazis.
The president’s annotation of the Niemöller reference also leaves out the fact that the first part of the text, which came from remarks in multiple speeches the former prisoner made during a lecture tour of Allied-occupied Germany in 1946, refers not to the rounding up of Germany’s Jews, but of its communists or socialists.
Chris Stein
The Senate on Monday passed a bipartisan measure aimed at lowering housing costs by streamlining construction and permitting, ending months of fraught negotiations on a priority for both parties ahead of November’s midterm elections.
The 21st Century Road to Housing Act would limit investors’ ability to buy homes, waives some federal permitting rules in an effort to ease new construction, and authorizes pilot programs to facilitate grants for home improvements and planning affordable housing. It passed the Senate overwhelmingly, with a vote of 85-5, and now heads to the House of Representatives.
The legislation comes as Democrats and Republicans prepare for November’s midterm elections, in which concerns about affordability are expected to loom large in the minds of the voters who will decide control of Congress for the final two years of Donald Trump’s term.
A shortfall in construction of new homes is seen as a key driver of housing costs, which have crept higher in recent years. Last year, House and Senate lawmakers began working on legislation that could draw the bipartisan support needed to pass, but wound up producing competing bills, creating an unusual standoff between the chambers.
The version the Senate approved on Monday combines aspects of both chambers’ bills, and includes language banning investors from buying single family homes if they already own 350 or more properties, which Trump has sought to crack down on. There are also provisions to expand access to manufactured homes, and increase mortgage availability.
Woman detained by a dozen federal officers for picking a piece of floating debris from Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool
To bolster his claim that “vandals”, not shoddy work by his hand-picked contractors, are responsible for chunks of newly applied sealant floating on the surface of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, Donald Trump pointed to a handful of arrests that have been made at the site.
Video from the water’s edge, however, shows that people are being arrested for much more innocuous behavior.
One incident on Monday, caught on video by Charlie Cotton of TMZ DC, showed a young woman dipping her hand into the pool to retrieve what looked like a small shard of the failed lining, only to be stopped by a man in a National Park Service T-shirt, who then placed her in the custody of two national guards troops.
Before she was eventually handed what looked like a citation by a police officer, the video shows that the woman was detained by a dozen men, including more national guard soldiers, US park police officers and at least one US Marshal.
At one stage, two of the guardsmen appeared to laugh with the woman over her arrest.
Later on Monday, the same video journalist also spoke to a man being led away in handcuffs from the pool area by US Park Police officers. The man said that he had been arrested for “yelling at Oklahoma state troopers.”
Asked why he was yelling at them, the man replied, “Because they’re here.” The federal takeover of policing in Washington DC is broadly resented in the city.
When the journalist asked why he would yell at the Oklahoma officers for policing the capital, the man laughed and said, “Lick the boot. If you love the boot, lick it.”
As two oil tankers cross strait of Hormuz, Trump falsely claims record oil flow
Donald Trump, who is fond of claiming to have set records that either do not exist, or he is nowhere near matching, told reporters on Monday that, as a result of the ceasefire in the war he started with Iran, the strait of Hormuz “is totally open” and “we took in more oil yesterday than we’ve ever, than has ever gone through the strait”.
That is not close to true.
Before the US-Israeli attack on Iran started on 28 February, about 50 large oil tankers crossed the strait each day, according to video collected by the ship-tracking company Starboard Maritime Intelligence.
Two crude tankers with just under 2m barrels of oil sailed through the strait of Hormuz on Monday, ship tracking data showed, and two supertankers, which can carry a maximum of 4 million barrels of crude, sailed into the Gulf through the strait, Reuters reports. One of the ships was bound for the Iraqi port of Basra.
Trump claims ‘pictures’ show ‘vandals’ cut a 350ft slit in the reflecting pool floor but declines to show evidence
In an entirely predictable development, when Donald Trump was just pressed by reporters to explain the flawed renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, he denied that the contractors he awarded the work to were to blame and instead insisted that “vandals” had used a knife or box-cutter to cut a 350ft “slit” in the newly applied sealant, which started peeling away from the floor and floating to the surface within days of its application.
“I can’t help it if somebody goes in with a knife and starts hacking it up,” the president said.
“They went in there with a knife”, Trump said, repeating a claim he first made on social media. “Five people are arrested and five people are under investigation right now,” the president added, despite the fact that the arrests that have been made appear to be of tourists or curious locals who dipped their hands into the water to collect floating bits of sealant as souvenirs of the failed renovation.
When he was asked, by Ed O’Keefe of CBS News, if he could provide any evidence that vandalism was to blame, Trump first suggested that the parks department could show reporters what he called the long gash in the sealant. Asked if there were photographs or video of vandals in the pool, Trump said “we also have pictures of it”, but said they would be revealed in court at a later date.
Trump then claimed that the growth of algae in the pool was also caused by unseen vandals. Attributing his claim to what “somebody said”, the president told reporters: “They put, somebody said, fertilizer in the water. If you put fertilizer in the water, you get algae. But somebody said they might’ve put fertilizer, they did something to create the algae.”
He went on to say that the water had now been “purified”, apparently a reference to the hydrogen peroxide workers were seen pouring into the pool last week, before at least one duckling was found dead in the water.
As he described the two executive orders he was about to sign in the Oval Office on Monday, Donald Trump seemed to reveal that he had no idea what at least one was about.
Reading from a binder on his desk, Trump said: “The second order I’m signing directs federal agencies to transition to what is called quantum … cryptography.”
The president paused before mispronouncing the word cryptography as “crypto-graphy”. He then looked up at reporters assembled in the room and asked: “Does anybody know what that is?”