Two weeks after a $15.9 million renovation, the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool is green, its sealant is falling off the floor, and it needs to be drained again. President Donald Trump has identified the culprit: vandals.
Trump posted on Truth Social Saturday that vandals had damaged the pool and that the water would need to be drained for repairs, adding that police had arrested “many additional people” for the damage. CNN identified one confirmed arrest — a man named Hearn who told the network he had done nothing of the sort.
“I didn’t remove anything. I didn’t break, tear, peel, or rip, or destroy anything,” he said, explaining that he had touched a piece of partially detached blue material that was already separating from the pool floor on its own. He is scheduled to appear in court on July 9.
The pool has been in visible distress since early June, when it was refilled following a renovation Trump announced in April as a project that would take a couple of weeks and cost under $2 million. Federal spending records show the total contracts ran to approximately $15.9 million — $14.2 million to Atlantic Industrial Coatings for the “American Flag Blue” resurfacing and $1.7 million to Green Water Solutions for water quality.
The renovation also bypassed the historic preservation review required by federal law for changes to landmark sites, according to a lawsuit the nonprofit Cultural Landscape Foundation filed against the Department of the Interior on May 11.
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Algae appeared within days of the pool being refilled, and workers were filmed on June 16 kneeling at the pool’s edge and pouring gallon jugs of hydrogen peroxide directly into the water — an improvised response that may have created a second problem.
The sealant began detaching from the floor around June 18, and Newsweek reported that experts say concentrated oxidising agents such as hydrogen peroxide can interact with coatings, weakening their bond to the underlying surface, raising the possibility that the attempt to clear the algae contributed to the sealant’s failure.
Christopher Lowe, a marine biologist at Swansea University, told Newsweek the dark coating may have compounded the algae problem in the first place by raising water temperature in an already warm, shallow pool — creating “perfect conditions for algae to bloom.”
Researchers have since identified the bloom itself as harmless — embarrassing, but not a health concern. The sealant peeling off the floor of a freshly renovated national landmark is a different matter entirely.
While the pool continued to turn green and its lining floated to the surface, the Department of the Interior responded by calling Trump “an expert builder who has fixed the Reflecting Pool for good” and blaming Obama and Biden for prior failures — a statement issued as workers prepared to drain the water and start over.
