[WaPo] Trump plans $200M overhaul of East Wing in significant change to White House

lol, if they wouldn’t have made such a big deal about this stupid deflection pond it wouldn’t have blown up in their faces the way it did.

like why did he even think he needed to refurbish the thing? It was completely fine. Why did he compare the thing to the size of skyscrapers when they didn’t alter the size of it in the first place?

why can’t they just admit they ****ed up a thing that didn’t need fixing in the first place?
lol now he has personally inspected it and they have TMZ working the case? What a **** show.

not one of these arrests will stick. Just like the botched sealant.

 

How many soldiers does it take to harass a woman for sticking their hand in the water?

 

think about this. if this is how blatantly he lies and makes up theories about a freaking pool repair, imagine the rest of the sht he is lying about.
how can anyone believe a word this guy says, of course other than lunatics like @El_Conquistador and other maga losers on this board.

 

<no bid contract>

 

I suspect the DOJ is now cooking up some false charges to bring against Ted Lieu.

 

Trump blames vandals for the green and peeling $16 million Reflecting Pool — his own motorcade drove across the wet paint weeks earlier

Just weeks before President Donald Trump blamed knife-wielding vandals for the peeling paint at the newly renovated Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, his own motorcade drove straight across it.

On May 7, Trump visited the drained pool to inspect the fresh "American Flag Blue" coating he had ordered. To get there, his motorcade, including the roughly 20,000-pound presidential limousine and armored SUVs, rolled across the pool floor while the new surface was still being applied. The moment was captured by multiple outlets, and White House Director of Communications Steven Cheung posted a video of the motorcade with the caption "they see me rolling!"

https://moneywise.com/news/top-stor...ial-reflecting-pool-green-algae-peeling-paint

 

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/june-27-2026


Observers are noting that the reflecting pool fiasco, in which Trump created the idea there was an emergency, ignored experts, bypassed normal procedures to give a wildly inflated contract to a crony, bragged about his success, ignored the problems, claimed his enemies had sabotaged him, and finally stationed troops around the landmark he had turned into a swamp, represents the Trump administration perfectly.

But a report by Michael Scherer of The Atlantic about Trump’s remodeling of the West Colonnade is perhaps an even better representation of the Trump presidency. In March, Trump tore up the light brown Tennessee flagstone that paved the walkway in the West Colonnade that connects the White House residence to the Oval Office and replaced it with polished black African granite carved in Italy. When a reporter asked Trump who was paying for the remodeling, Trump answered: “Paid for by me.”

But, as Scherer discovered, that was a lie. He examined National Park Service budget documents showing that the walkway replacement cost taxpayers $689,232, all part of a $1.3 million project that includes new hardware for nearby doors. Last year, Scherer reports, the National Park Service spent $347,503 to replace the stucco on the colonnade wall so Trump could hang pictures of the U.S. presidents alongside plaques featuring his own opinions of them. Documents say the project was a “Rush project at request of POTUS.”

Scherer explains that Trump has redirected taxpayer money from national parks around the country to his own projects, leaving the parks unable to make needed repairs or hire staff. Expected funding for more than 900 Park Service projects never arrived—including $424,000 to replace a guardrail on the edge of a cliff in Colorado’s Gunnison National Park that National Park Service employees identified as “a significant safety hazard for visitors.” For some parks, nearly 70% of approved funds have been pulled back.

Trump has also pulled National Park Service staff to Washington, D.C., for his Freedom 250 events, a crisis because the Park Service has lost almost a quarter of its staff since he took office. In his 2027 budget, Trump calls for cutting staff by another 3,967 full-time employees, or 31%.

That budget also asked for another $10 billion to beautify Washington, a sum that Scherer notes is nearly eight times as large as all the money spent on National Park Service projects in 2025. The Senate Appropriations Committee stripped that request out of its marked-up version of the president’s budget.

The administration appears eager to keep what’s happening in the national parks out of sight. Early this year, the Department of the Interior instructed its employees that they could not share information about serious injuries or deaths on public lands, instead redirecting all such information through the Department of the Interior’s Office of Communications.

As outdoors writer Wes Siler reports in his Wes Siler’s Newsletter, the Interior Department “manages the National Park Service, Bureau of Land Management, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Bureau of Reclamation, and Bureau of Indian Affairs. Those agencies are responsible for about 20 percent of all land area in the United States, hundreds of millions of annual visitors, and spend annually $88.6 billion taxpayer dollars.”

As Jake Spring reported in the Washington Post, more than 300 million people visit America’s national parks each year, and about 350 of them die (not always from accidents). In the past, park service employees could identify deaths or injuries from unsafe conditions, warning others from the area. Now the communications team from the Interior Department controls that information and does not always release it.

It did not release the information that a 72-year-old man died of extreme heat on a popular trail in the Grand Canyon on June 12 of this year. NPS employees wanted to warn other visitors, but the Interior Department did not release the information. Four days later a couple aged 67 and 68 also died of extreme heat on the same trail.

The profligate use of our tax dollars for whatever Trump and his cronies want while the American people suffer is at least as representative of Trump’s reign as is the peeling, algae-filled, militarily guarded Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.

This president and administration are turning the extraordinary resources of the American people—the things we the people have created over decades with our effort and our tax dollars—to their own ends. We are paying for their theft with a significantly diminished country, and even with our lives.

…