Vandals used box cutter or knife to cut 290 or 300-foot “slit” in lining of Reflecting Pool
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Even the Liberal Blog Lawyers Guns & Money unequivocally condemns this act of domestic terrorism:
Donald Trump furiously blamed “vandals” for the growing mess that has overtaken his project to renovate the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool on Monday.
At an unrelated White House event, a reporter asked Trump about the ongoing state of the pool. The structure, which is the length of multiple city blocks, has been under renovation for weeks after Trump decided to drain the pool and had the surface spray-painted with an aqua blue coating used in swimming pools.
Photos and videos over the past week have shown chunks of that coating separating and floating up to the surface amid a swamp-green mess of algae that National Parks Service employees are desperately battling.
Trump claimed on Monday that a 300-foot long “slit” had appeared in the pool coating, which he attributed to a box cutter or knife and claimed that the National Parks Service was investigating. Reporters have not independently confirmed his account of the damage.
“No, we had vandalism…no, vandals,” he responded, when asked who was responsible for the problems. “We have a 290-, I think 300-foot slit right through, probably a box cutter or a knife of some kind.”
According to Trump, the pool may need to be drained and repainted again.
The project has ballooned into a $14 million money hole for the administration, which has included the effort to resurface and repair the famously-leaky Reflecting Pool in the president’s broader campaign to beautify downtown Washington, D.C.
Employees with the park surface have been unable to clear the pool of algae since the pool was refilled and the continued issues facing the project have become somewhat of a fixation for D.C. residents, reporters and others bemusedly watching the situation from afar.
Reporters have not been able to verify any acts of actual vandalism within the pool, which at times has been fenced off as workers continue repainting and de-algaefication efforts. Critics of the project say the blue paint is a waste, and transforms the original intended look of the memorial.
The president was challenged to provide proof of his claims of vandalism at his event on Monday, and claimed that the existence of the “slit” which he described in varying sizes was proof itself; reporters have not seen it for themselves.
And it’s not just the box cutter (odds that Trump got the “box cutter” idea from his jumbled memory of the 9/11 attacks: 100%), it’s the fertilizer that got dumped into the Reflecting Pool, which is in a very isolated area that can only be visited after a several-day trek across uninhabited wilds, making security extremely difficult to maintain (all facts in the preceding sentence may have been fabricated).
He also said someone may have put fertilizer in the water to create the algae bloom.
“I can’t help it if someone goes in with a knife and hacking it up,” he said. Asked for evidence of the claim, the president said, “You’ll see it in court.”
All of this is just completely nuts. The 300-foot invisible slit surreptitiously created by vandals wielding a box cutter is pure 25th amendment la-la land stuff, and about a hundred times more confused and unhinged than anything Joe Biden said on his worst day.
And let’s not overlook that Trump’s obsession with the Reflecting Pool is a product of the fact that the Obama administration struggled to deal with some maintenance issues regarding it, which of course triggered all of America’s Racist Demented Grandpa’s need to prove his unimpeachable superiority to the [clang] who stole the WHITE House from its rightful owners.
. . . Breaking: Slit now up to 350 feet:
H/T commenter Judas Peckerwood.
. . . . Woah this is from May 4th!
Trump on the Reflecting Pool: “It’s very strong. You couldn’t, if you had a knife — I don’t want to give anybody ideas — if you had a knife, you can’t even cut it. So strong, so powerful.”
I watched a snail crawl along the edge of a straight razor . . .