US President Donald Trump reacts to topics in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., June 4, 2026. REUTERS_Jonathan Ernst
It's hard to keep up with the never-ending cascade of drama pouring out of the White House these days, but reporter David A. Fahrenthold tells Slate that one of President Donald Trump’s more recent grifts is more obvious and even easier to expose than some others. From the very start of Trump’s announcement of the “bluing” of the Lincoln memorial reflecting pool, there were questions — and plenty to be suspicious about.
“What was remarkable was that at every step, as you peeled back another layer, something wasn’t quite what it was supposed to be or what Trump had said it was. It seemed as if it should have been a simple job. But every step made it more interesting,” Fahrenthold told Slate writer Aymann Ismail.
Aside from this being an expensiveno-bid contract, Trump had announced that: “I found this contractor myself. He worked on the pool at my golf club.”
Only he didn’t. The president’s pool guy was not renovating the Reflecting Pool, said Fahrenthold.
“Once we started reporting, we found all these ways in which his account didn’t seem to square with reality. We realized, ‘Wait, it’s not actually a pool guy.’ And then all these other things the president had said about it turned out not to be true.
“First, he’s not Trump’s pool guy,” said Fahrenthold. “He’s not anybody’s pool guy. It’s a company that, as far as I can tell, doesn’t do swimming pools. They coat highway culverts. They work on fuel tanks and roofs and things like that, but they are not a swimming pool company at all. And as far as I can tell, they have never worked for any of Trump’s pool companies.”
And it’s not like anybody was saying this needed to happen. The slabs at the bottom of the pool are 8 inches of concrete, said Fahrenthold.
“If water is leaking through 8 inches of concrete, it’s not very much. Nobody had ever said that this was the problem that needed fixing. But all of a sudden, the Trump administration decided, 'This is something we need to do, and we need to spend millions of dollars to do it,'” Fahrenthold said.
So Trump’s people chose a company with no experience with sealing pools. Fahrenthold says they’re disregarding expert opinions. The administration is locking other, potentially cheaper and better bidders out of the process, and they’re jumping right in to finish the project in a rush to July 4.
Fahrenthold says if they’re this sloppy for a reflecting pool, how does the administration manage even bigger projects, like a war in Iran? Or a press to upset global trade with a blanket of painful tariffs?
“If the Reflecting Pool contract goes bad, what happens? The pool leaks a little bit. There’s algae. It’s not that different from the status quo Trump inherited. But you can tell, in that situation, how they got themselves into this easily avoidable problem,” Fahrenthold told Ismail . “And you can see their decision-making approach to a million other things that are much more important.”