Daniel Dale , CNN; Fact check: Trump’s false and unproven claims about the Reflecting Pool
"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.”"
