Fact check: Trump’s false and unproven claims about the Reflecting Pool

By Daniel Dale, CNN

(CNN) — President Donald Trump has created a murky mess of unproven claims and provably false claims about the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.

Trump began asserting over the weekend, without providing evidence, that the visible problems with the reflecting pool were caused by “Vandals” rather than the recent rapid repair project he had claimed would immediately make the pool “much more beautiful” than it was when it was built in the 1920s. He declared in a social media post on Saturday that until these vandals “took some form of knife or blade, and put a 250 foot long gash into the beautiful facade,” his version of the pool “worked perfectly.”

That is dubious at best – even aside from the current absence of public proof for Trump’s claims about blade-wielding vandals doing such damage. There has been no extended period since the pool was refilled in early June when it looked pristine. Algae was visible within days of the refilling, and it kept appearing even after the Trump administration declared that the water had been made “crystal clear.”

The New York Times reported Tuesday that internal government documents showed 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.”

Trump raised skepticism about the existence of the “gash” in the pool by frequently changing his portrayal of it – describing it Saturday as a 250-foot gash, Monday as a 300-foot gash, later Monday as a 350-foot slit, and Tuesday as “actually numerous slashes over a very long 350 foot length.” The Times reported that the internal documents did mention two 171-foot blade cuts, which would put the total close to the 350-foot figure Trump has used. However, the Times said, the documents did not make any allegations about how these reported cuts ended up in the pool.

On Tuesday night, Fox News aired video provided by the Interior Department that the department claimed showed people vandalizing the pool. The video appeared to show two people standing outside the edge of the pool and then bending or crouching to reach down into the side of the pool for several seconds, as other people milled about around them, but it’s not clear from the footage what they were doing when they reached down; though the department alleged to Fox News that the video shows people “destroying and removing a piece of the lining and attempting destruction of the lining,” even Fox host Jesse Watters said, “We don’t know if they’re committing a crime.” Regardless, the video certainly doesn’t show the creation of two 171-foot gashes.

Trump’s false claims about the reflecting pool

We’ll continue seeking information about the alleged vandalism. Entirely aside from Trump’s claims on that topic, though, he has for weeks been making claims about the reflecting pool that are demonstrably inaccurate.

Obama and the pool’s status: Trump said at a Monday event that after a two-year repair project under former President Barack Obama, the pool “never even opened”; he similarly said in a Monday post that the pool was “rarely open due to leaks and ‘stench’” under Obama and former President Joe Biden. In reality, the pool reopened in August 2012 and has been open for the vast majority of the days since.

There have been various subsequent short closures for maintenance and further repairs, including one in October 2012, and a small fraction of the pool was closed for an extended stretch of 2015 and 2016 to repair damage caused by the construction of a nearby memorial. But those shutdowns have been the exception over the last 13-plus years, not the norm.

Past presidents’ pool spending: Trump has also continued to exaggerate Obama’s spending on the reflecting pool, saying at the Monday event that the two-year project cost “over $100 million.” The contract was actually for about $35 million; Trump’s White House could not provide any corroboration for his much larger figure when CNN inquired in May. Nor has the president’s team provided any support for his claims, which he repeated at the Monday event, that Biden also spent tens of millions to try to fix the pool.

The Biden administration did not go ahead with any major reflecting pool repair project. Chuck Sams, who was director of the National Park Service under Biden, told CNN in May that they had received a cost estimate “above $100 million” for a “full rehabilitation” but had not gone ahead with that work. Sams said it “would have more than likely moved forward if we had remained in office,” but Trump keeps suggesting that it actually happened.

The size of the pool: This Trump claim is not very important, but in the interest of accuracy, it’s worth noting that the president has also repeatedly exaggerated the length of the reflecting pool.

He said June 10 that it’s an “almost-2,500-foot-long” pool, adding, “That’s taller than any building in the world, actually.” But the reflecting pool is 2,028 feet long, according to a page that was on the National Park Service website as of late May; Trump correctly wrote in a May social media post that it is “approximately 2,030 feet” and held up a poster on June 3 putting it at “2,030 ft.” Also, a length of “almost 2,500” feet would not be “taller” than any building in the world even if you ignore the pertinent fact that a pool on the ground is not a skyscraper that extends into the air. The world’s tallest skyscraper, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, is more than 2,700 feet tall.

CNN’s Betsy Klein contributed to this article.

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