Fresh off blaming vandals for the algae and peeling paint plaguing his Reflecting Pool renovation, Donald Trump turned his fire on the press for covering it. He accused ABC News of “false reporting” for failing to credit past administrations’ spending on the pool, and vowed to sue.
CNBC reports:
U.S. President Donald Trump has threatened to sue broadcaster ABC for its reporting on the cost of repairing damage sustained by the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in Washington D.C. Trump said the network had not reported costs incurred by previous administrations in maintaining the landmark.
In a post on Truth Social, Trump claimed that ABC “failed to report that their close ’friends,’ Dumocrats Obama and Biden, spent over 100 Million Dollars on the Reflecting Pool, and it never worked.” ...
“We are preparing lawsuits against ABC for false reporting. I like their money, which will be given to the U.S. Treasury,” Trump added, also referencing $16 million that ABC paid to settle a defamation case he filed in 2024.
The latest action against ABC comes as the company faces two investigations from the Federal Communications Commission, led by Trump appointee Brendan Carr.President Trump says the peeling blue coating and algae blooms that mar his $16.4 million renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool are the fault of vandals working with “knives” in the “dark of night.”
But government documents obtained by The New York Times show that while National Park Service workers found two cuts in sections of foam between the pool’s expansion joints, those were not directly related to the “American flag blue” coating that is now peeling, or to the algae that has turned the pool a bright shade of green.
Even as the documents show workers were attempting to address deteriorating conditions, Trump administration officials were insisting publicly that the pool was pristine. ...
On Saturday, Mr. Trump acknowledged the pool would have to be at least partially drained for more work. On Tuesday, the president said on social media that six people had been arrested, and seven others had been cited, for slashing the pool’s sealant with a “sharp knife or razors.”
“It was purposefully and criminally done, and somebody had to work very hard, probably in the dark of night,” he wrote.
Mr. Trump also told reporters on Monday, without offering evidence, that vandals had poured fertilizer into the pool to feed the algae.
Neither the Interior Department nor the White House would provide charging documents, citations or the names of anyone arrested.
Threatening to sue a network for accurately reporting an embarrassing story isn’t a policy dispute; it’s an attempt to make honest coverage of his administration more expensive than it’s worth. ABC joins the Wall Street Journal, the BBC, and The New York Times on the list of outlets Trump has sued or threatened to sue in just the past year.
The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.
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