OPINION:
President Trump has long been a masterful liar. That’s not a partisan attack — it’s practically a biographical fact.
From the well-documented allegations that he inflated asset values when borrowing money and deflated them come tax time, to his claim of shooting a 2-under-par 70 at age 80 to win his 40th club championship, the man has always had a complicated relationship with the truth.
As the New York Times noted before his 2016 election, Mr. Trump “proudly acknowledges he did not pay a dime in federal income taxes for years on end,” insisting “he merely exploited tax loopholes legally available to any billionaire.” Framing brazen tax avoidance as a kind of genius. Sure.
But sometimes, the lies catch up with you. And when they do, it’s rarely pretty.
Enter the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool — the unlikely setting for one of the most spectacular self-owns in recent presidential history.
Here’s what happened. Last year, Atlantic Industrial Coatings, a Virginia-based firm, was handed a $14.7 million no-bid contract to repaint and waterproof the pool ahead of Mr. Trump’s America 250 July 4th celebrations. The result wasn’t the gleaming, “American flag blue” landmark anyone had hoped for. It was a peeling, algae-infested embarrassment, fenced off from the public like a crime scene — which, in a sense, it was.
Rather than own the botched job, Mr. Trump did what Mr. Trump does. He made up a story, blaming vandals. Radical ones. With box cutters.
He directed Jeanine Pirro — Fox News bloviator, MAGA loyalist, and his handpicked U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia — to prosecute former Olympian David Hearn and three others for the alleged vandalism. The charges were serious. The evidence, it turns out, was not.
After months of pursuing the case, Ms. Pirro’s office dropped every single charge. All four defendants. Gone. Why? Because the evidence pointed not to radical vandals but to something far more inconvenient: Mr. Trump’s own contractor had botched the job. The Interior Department hadn’t even handed over its evidence until after the indictment. There was no case. There was never a case.
Ms. Pirro did the honorable, professionally responsible thing. She closed the prosecution. Mr. Trump called it something else entirely. “Frankly, I think she choked because the judge was really vicious,” the president fumed from the Oval Office. “She folded like an umbrella.” He declared he was “really disappointed” in Ms. Pirro — a woman who had spent years staking her reputation, her credibility, and arguably her dignity on his behalf.
So to recap: Ms. Pirro told the truth, refused to pursue a case she couldn’t win, and got publicly humiliated by the man she serves. That’s the loyalty loop in Trump World. You lie for him, and when the lying becomes legally untenable, you’re a coward.
But here’s where it gets genuinely damning. Back in April, Mr. Trump publicly boasted about personally choosing the contractor for the Reflecting Pool project. “I have a guy who’s unbelievable at doing swimming pools,” he bragged, describing how he’d consulted firms that had worked on his own properties before selecting one with ties to his Northern Virginia golf course.
Fast forward to this week. The same president looked reporters in the eye and said, “I didn’t know the contractor.”
That’s not a misstatement. That’s not a senior moment. That’s a deliberate, verifiable, on-the-record lie — the kind with receipts attached. The original quote exists. The $14.7 million no-bid contract awarded to his preferred firm is a matter of public record. Meanwhile, the pool sits drained and fenced off, repair costs have ballooned from $1.5 million to north of $15 million, and Mr. Trump insists it’ll all be sorted in “a week and a half to two weeks.”
The Reflecting Pool saga is, in miniature, the story of Mr. Trump’s second term: A loud accusation, a manufactured villain, a collapse of evidence, and a pivot so brazen it would make a defense attorney wince.
And the world has started to notice. Abroad, the fear that once greeted Mr. Trump’s every ultimatum has curdled into something closer to eye-rolling. When he announced another tariff barrage recently, France’s central bank governor predicted little impact. Britain said its exporters were largely unaffected. The financial markets barely flinched. Analysts have coined a useful acronym for the pattern: TACO — Trump Always Chickens Out.
That’s the real cost of crying wolf at a drained reflecting pool. When a president lies about a contractor, frames innocent athletes as vandals, and then publicly savages the prosecutor brave enough to admit the case was baseless, something breaks. Not just credibility — authority.
Ms. Pirro told the truth and was called a coward. The real coward is the man who hired the wrong contractor, demanded a rushed job, blamed blameless people when it failed, and then looked the cameras dead in the eye and said he didn’t know the contractor at all.
Mr. Trump didn’t just lie about the Reflecting Pool. He lied about lying. And at this point, even his allies have started to notice the umbrella keeps folding.
• Joseph Curl covered the White House and politics for a decade for The Washington Times. He can be reached at josephcurl@gmail.com.
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