On Monday, while delivering his final address before Election Day, President Donald Trump spoke in front of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool and repeated his disproven vandalism claims before perhaps his smallest rally crowd yet. During his remarks, the president also mentioned that he was giving "serious consideration" to renaming the pool after himself.
Speaking with notably less energy than usual, a lackluster and unfocused Trump announced the reopening of the Reflecting Pool — the renovation of which has played out in the media as something of a farce — before dropping some breaking news: "Now we're giving serious thought to changing the name to the Trump Reflecting Pool," and the decision would be revealed within the next day or two. "I'm sure Secretary of the Interior Doug Bergum will have a lot of fun announcing that," he predicted. "I'm only kidding," Trump said suddenly. "Please don't report it."
He then declared that the pool is "more beautiful than ever," before claiming "we went through a lot with vandalism — the vandalism was unprecedented" — an assertion he made despite the fact that his administration's vandalism claims had been previously disproven in court in dramatic fashion. "People don't like talking about it," he said. He then spent a while complaining about Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden's inability to renovate the pool — a topic he would return to throughout the address — before saying his administration had done a "great job," even though "the vandals went to work, but we also went to work on the vandals." He shifted gears briefly to ramble about crime in D.C., before circling back to a central theme of the address: "There was great vandalism, with slashing — we have pictures of it. We have photographs of it. In fact, Jesse Watters on Fox did a whole long piece on it. It was sad to watch, because the vandals really went to town. A lot of people tried to protect the vandals."
His administration had not, in fact, done a "great job." The no-bid contractor — the owner of which happened to be a Republican donor and neighbor to Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort — admitted that its own errors had led to the new pool liner peeling off and tearing, despite White House claims that the damage was caused by vandals, including former Olympian David Hearn. When Hearn was charged by U.S. Attorney and longtime Trump ally Jeanine Pirro, the case blew up in their faces when it was revealed that the government's own investigation contradicted their claims. After Pirro dropped the charges, Trump raged publicly against her for having "folded," regardless of the evidence disproving his claims. Fearing the administration would continue to persecute Hearn, the judge presiding over the case dismissed it "with prejudice," which barred the Department of Justice from attempting to resurrect the charges in the future. Nevertheless, Trump has persisted in his claims. During the address, he continued to complain about "sick people" slashing the pool with "box knives and knives."
Trump — offering his final pitch before Election Day— was speaking before a small gathering of wide-brimmed hat-wearing National Parks staff, White House officials, and the press, in what was arguably his lowest-energy appearance on record. The bulk of his comments focused on the Reflecting Pool and other vanity projects, regardless of polls that show voters think he's focused on the wrong priorities.
