With the paint peeling and the water turning green, President Donald Trump has been on the defensive lately over his $14 million renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.
Over the weekend, he attempted to redirect the increasingly spiraling media narrative surrounding the renovations by claiming the woes befalling the Reflecting Pool were the result of “vandalism.” Trump made this assertion without evidence, and on Monday doubled down on the rhetoric, while taking some pot shots at his predecessor’s handling of the monument.
Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office, Trump claimed that the supposed vandals “went in there with a knife.”
“We have 100, and we have a, I think, 290, 300-foot slit right through it, probably a box cutter or a knife of some kind. We had people lifting up the basic, some of the bays. It’s not a lot of damage, but we’ll probably have to let the water out and re-fix it,” Trump said. “They went in there with a knife. I was just told by the, by the people over at Parks (National Park Service), they have five people are arrested and five people are under investigation right now, and it’s a sad thing.”
AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein
CBS News senior White House correspondent Ed O’Keefe pressed the president on this bizarre explanation, asking how anyone could have inflicted such damage while the National Guard was patrolling the National Mall.
“I mean, we didn’t have, we didn’t have a lot of them (National Guard) then. Who would think that somebody would go into a pool and take a knife and start cutting it?” Trump said.
“But do you have proof of that? That they used a knife?” O’Keefe asked.
“Well, let’s put it this way, when you have a 350, I think it’s 350, not 250, a 350-foot slit from one end to the other. You think that’s true?” Trump said.
Trump added that anyone looking for evidence of the so-called “slit” should contact the National Park Service.
AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana
Trump also claimed that vandals were responsible for the algae blooms in the Reflecting Pool.
“They put, somebody said, fertilizer in the water. If you put fertilizer in the water, you get algae, but somebody said they might have put fertilizer. They did something to create the algae, but that doesn’t matter because that’s been purified. It’s dead, laying at the bottom,” Trump said.
O’Keefe asked Trump about the cost of the renovations and how he had claimed in April that the project would only be $1 million.
“Okay. Ready. Barack Hussein Obama, have you ever heard of him?” Trump asked.
“Yeah,” O’Keefe responded.
“He spent two years and over $100 million on trying to fix it. You know what happened to it? Never even opened. He took the water from the river, you know about that, right? It turned out to be putrid, and it destroyed the whole thing,” Trump said.
Despite Trump’s $100 million claim, an analysis from The Associated Press found that Obama’s two-year renovation of the Reflecting Pool, which was completed in 2012, cost $34 million.