A Gift To Us All: “how The Reflecting Pool Came To Mirror Trump’s Washington”

"Put more simply: documents and interviews establish how a first-time contractor was paid millions of dollars to apply a novel solution designed by a golf club manager to a national landmark." www.nytimes.com/2026/08/07/u…

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— Matthew Gertz (@mattgertz.bsky.social) August 7, 2026 at 9:27 AM

What a first paragraph! The NYTimes is doing what it does best here: exhaustively researching, and explaining, how the interlocking pathologies of the GOP in general and the Trump administration in particular screwed up a highly visible piece of our common legacy at vast public expense. Gift link:

In January, the World of Concrete trade show drew 47,000 people to the Las Vegas Convention Center. One of them was the manager of a Trump Organization golf club in New Jersey, who had come seeking help with an enormous, unfamiliar task.

The manager, David Schutzenhofer, wanted ideas for how to fix the leaking, algae-ridden Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in Washington.

Several vendors told him they knew just the guy to call: Rodney Jarboe, the president of the Missouri-based company Creative Polymers. Mr. Jarboe had worked on a bridge at another federal landmark, the Gateway Arch in St. Louis.

In an interview, Mr. Jarboe said he first spoke in March with Mr. Schutzenhofer, who made clear that the work would be rushed. President Trump, Mr. Jarboe said he was told, wanted the renovation project done in time for the country’s 250th birthday on July 4…

Those initial conversations about the Reflecting Pool, which have not previously been reported, kicked off an ad hoc plan by the Trump administration that involved coating the pool with a sheet of blue polyurea, which the president promised would make it beautiful. Within months, though, the pool was drained and ugly — the butt of jokes and memes.

Many of the details of the saga are reported in this article for the first time. They show that the pool, which was supposed to reflect the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument, became a striking reflection instead of the second Trump administration’s willingness to skirt laws, expend millions of dollars, ignore facts and punish truth tellers in service of the president’s demands to put his mark on the capital.

The Interior Department, led by Doug Burgum, handed out no-bid contracts and squelched doubts about the costs and risks. An employee from Mr. Trump’s private business life, Mr. Schutzenhofer, played an off-the-books role in government decisions. A top federal housing official, Bill Pulte, brought Mr. Trump memes that encouraged him to keep going.

And when Mr. Trump sought to blame the project’s failure on shadowy vandals, Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney in Washington, backed him up by charging members of the public with crimes, only to have the cases fall apart.

Then, in place of accountability, there were falsehoods on top of falsehoods, part of Mr. Trump’s longtime strategy of not admitting mistakes and treating concessions of error as signs of weakness…

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