President Donald Trump reportedly skirted the rules to spend massive amounts of money on something Americans never dreamed they needed: A Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool painted blue.
Trump ordered the makeover of the century-old pool on the National Mall, which has been the focal point of such historic gatherings as Vietnam War protests and Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech.
Trump somehow determined that overhauling the pool was suddenly “urgent.” That leaky determination allowed him to simply hand a hefty $6.9 million no-bid contract to the company he said worked on the pool at Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Virginia.
“I have a guy who’s unbelievable at doing swimming pools,” the president told the press in late April. He initially claimed the project would cost $2 million.
The pool contract turned the project into a “reflection of Washington’s present,” wrote The New York Times, which pored over the details of the pricey venture.
Most notable was the Trump administration’s flat-faced insistence that painting the pool blue was “urgent.” The exemption is supposed to be used only to prevent “serious injury, financial or other, to the government.” Instead, the urgency was the president’s whim, and his desire to spruce things up in time for the nation’s 250th birthday.
White House spokeswoman Taylor Rogers apparently tried to make the project seem more urgent by telling the Times it was being done at “Trump speed.”
On April 3, the pool repair contract was awarded to New Canton, Virginia-based Atlantic Industrial Coatings, which had never held a federal contract before, according to records.
Even more confounding: The Times found that the company’s website doesn’t mention any previous swimming pool work—only waterproofing structures like roofs and water tanks, and restoring highway culverts.
ABC News’ senior political correspondent Rachel Scott didn’t see the urgency in the project, and challenged the president about it on Thursday.
“Mr. President, you are here against the backdrop of the war in Iran. Why focus on all these projects right now? We’re still seeing gas prices soaring,” she asked.
Trump responded that the project was “beautiful,” and that Scott was a “horror show” and a “disgrace” who had asked a “stupid question.”
Trump was so pleased with his imagined revamp of the reflecting pool that he posted an AI image of himself chilling in the pool shirtless with Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, and a bikini-clad woman who may or may not have been Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins.
The project is just the latest case of Trump invoking special powers to dodge rules and hand lucrative contracts directly to his personally chosen contractors, treating the nation as his own “imperial realm” to “decorate or destroy,” the Times noted.
It’s a radical change in the history of America. Without any approvals, Trump tore down the East Wing of the White House to build a 90,000-square-foot ballroom designed to his specifications (also via a no-bid contract), paved over the Rose Garden, and installed a giant statue of controversial explorer Christopher Columbus on the White House grounds.
The dramatic changes have become “secretive” projects in which the “friends and business associates of the president are being rewarded with no public scrutiny,” Tim Whitehouse, the executive director of the watchdog group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, complained to the Times.
Beyond the secretive deal-making behind the redo are the many challenges bound to create problems for Trump’s hand-picked contractor. The leaky, 2,000-foot-long shallow pond is prone to algae growth that turns it green. It’s not clear if a paint job will change that.
“Painting is not going to solve that problem,” Tim Auerhahn, chairman of the Aquatic Council, a consulting firm for the pool and hot-tub industry, told the Times.
