Reflecting Pool Contractor Admits It Messed Up From the Very Start

The contractor President Trump hired to renovate the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool is taking full responsibility for the pool’s torn blue paint and lining.

The New York Times reports that Atlantic Industrial Coatings told the White House that its own failures were responsible for the botched renovation, not vandals, contradicting the Trump administration’s claim that the pool had been sabotaged.

The Times cited government documents from the past two months showing that AIC found issues in planning and executing the renovation. In reports dated August 14 and September 2, the company blamed its own work, saying that workers did not spray enough primer to keep the pool liner’s layers stuck together.

The company also said that its repair plan for the liner layers called for the use of two chemicals that weren’t compatible with each other. The chemical on top reached a high temperature that the one below couldn’t handle, leading to the bottom layer of the liner blistering and coming loose.

Trump has repeatedly claimed that vandals using sharp tools like knives and box cutters slashed at the pool’s new “American flag blue” paint, causing it to peel. His U.S. attorney in Washington, D.C., Jeanine Pirro, even charged several people over that false claim, including former Olympian David Hearn. Eventually, all of the charges were dropped.

All of this shows that the Trump administration rushed through a botched renovation. Officials bypassed the bidding process to hand the contract to AIC, which used a process partially designed by David Schutzenhofer, the general manager of Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey. When that effort failed spectacularly, Trump blamed random people for the pool he ruined rather than take responsibility.

Twenty-five years after the September 11 attacks, NPR spoke with a support group for undocumented workers who served on clean-up crews following the attacks—individuals who are now being tirelessly persecuted by the Trump administration.

Rosa Bramble Caballero, a social worker who runs the clean up crew support group, described how multiple contractors were paid millions of dollars to manage the clean-up response. Those companies hired subcontractors, and those companies in turn hired day laborers standing on street corners.

“Many women who did housekeeping were taken there. And then they got there and realized they were actually at ground zero, which, by the way, sometimes they were not told that that’s where they were going,” she said. It isn’t clear just how many undocumented workers were involved in these efforts, but estimates are between 2,000 and 6,000 people.

Undocumented workers are entitled to workers’ compensation, and individuals have received around $80,000 each for their work on 9/11 clean up crews in the past. But in light of the Trump administration’s sweeping crackdown on immigrants, Bramble Caballero said many are now too scared to apply. For others, the money only went so far. “Because they are undocumented and their health has been compromised, they really can no longer work. So although they may have received awards, those awards dry out,” she told NPR.

One support group member who spoke to NPR, Lucelly from Colombia, didn’t know where she was going when she got picked up off the street for a cleaning job on the morning of September 12. Lucelly approached Ground Zero armed only with a paper mask and rubber gloves. Years later, Lucelly was diagnosed with breast cancer and respiratory disease after coming into contact with toxic debris and air—although the city was well aware it was unsafe.

Another woman, Rosa from Guatemala, worked in demolition and was shocked to see the scant safety measures immigrants workers were using at the site. “It was mostly Ecuadorians, Colombians, Peruvians, Mexicans. There were so many people doing the same work as me … but wearing little paper masks.”

Among responders and survivors, there have been more than 57,000 cases of cancer and more than 10,000 cases of chronic respiratory disorder linked to the site. Now, they also have Donald Trump’s extrajudicial militias to worry about.

“I am scared. We are all scared. My daughter lives in New Jersey, and I don’t even go visit her, because I am scared of immigration. It is a new pain on top of an old one,” Lucelly told NPR.

“We gave it all. When we got to Ground Zero we felt so much fear. Oh the fear we felt! No one ever asked to check out immigration status. Oh no, they treated us like we were real important back then. It was: ‘Go in Lucelly. Go Lucelly. Get in there.’”

Donald Trump doesn’t care about anybody but himself, according to Republican insiders.

That’s not necessarily news to the rest of the country. America’s felonious, billionaire president has been in office for a cumulative total of five and a half years, and in the public limelight much longer. Trump has allegedly cheated his employees, abused the power of his office, defrauded the American public, and sexually abused at least 27 women. He was found guilty of buying Stormy Daniels’s silence ahead of the 2016 election, was found to have defamed and abused writer E. Jean Carroll, has relentlessly attacked media outlets that report on his administration, and has made at least $2.2 billion through various grifts since the beginning of his second term.

His egoism knows no bounds: 25 years ago, hours after the Twin Towers had collapsed, Trump took a moment while calling in to a local news station to mention that the Trump Building at 40 Wall Street was once again the tallest building in lower Manhattan.

But with just weeks until the midterm election, top Republicans are apparently finally waking up from the delusion that Trump ever cared about the future of the conservative party, and are stunned and dismayed to find that Trump is just as selfish as ever.

“He doesn’t care about Republicans winning the midterms,” one top Republican operative close to the White House told Vanity Fair Friday. “You got a tax cut, which is great. But then all you’ve got is a ballroom and war with Iran. That’s all he’s talking about. The ballroom and the fucking Reflecting Pool.

“He just doesn’t give a shit anymore. He doesn’t care about Republicans,” the operative continued. “I don’t think he really wants JD [Vance] or anyone else to win in 2028. That’s why you’re seeing him naming the Kennedy Center after him, naming an airport after him. It’s all legacy vanity. That’s all he cares about.”

Truly, Trump has done almost nothing to assist his Republican subordinates. Through just his second term alone, Trump has repeatedly incensed the American electorate by thrusting the country into a forever war with Iran, indiscriminately annihilating small watercraft in the Caribbean and the Pacific, abducting Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro in a midnight raid, aggravating America’s longest alliances—most notably with Canada—with a seemingly endless fountain of shitposts, tearing down the White House in order to build a $600 million, gold-laden ballroom, and repeatedly kowtowing to Moscow.

His influence only seems to further endanger the GOP’s election odds this November as he continues to make an already contentious midterm cycle a referendum on his popularity.

“I’m asking you to pretend I’m on the ballot!” Trump told the crowd at the midterm convention Wednesday night.

That won’t bode well for Republican odds: Roughly 56 percent of the country currently disapproves of Trump’s performance, according to an aggregated poll by The New York Times.

Former San Francisco immigration Judge Chloe Dillon has filed a lawsuit alleging that the Justice Department fired her for challenging Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s tactics.

Dillon states that she repeatedly came forward with concerns about ICE’s unlawful actions, including on August 20, when she sent an email to her boss reporting that ICE “unlawfully detained an unaccompanied minor” after a hearing in her courtroom.

She was fired two days later, a decision she says was “without cause” and for which she was given no notice. Dillon argues that the firing broke her “constitutional due process rights” and that “the removal was taken, in part, on her perceived political views.”

“It is important for people to know that the immigration courts no longer exist as an unbiased forum,” Dillon told Newsweek. “This issue reaches everyone—if not personally, someone in their community is undoubtedly affected by immigration.”

Her lawsuit against the DOJ also cites a 2025 email she sent citing concerns over a directive “to grant any and all motions to change venue” filed by ICE attorneys.

“First, the idea that ICE motions to change venue should always be granted is contrary to law and offends due process,” she told Newsweek. “Second, ICE arrests at courthouses—particularly of an unaccompanied minor who had rights under a DOJ settlement agreement—endanger everyone and disrupt the orderly conduct of the court.”

Her lawsuit begins with one of George Orwell’s most famous quotes: “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”

Dillon is one of 14 judges who have been fired during Donald Trump’s second tenure.

The suit is specifically against Attorney General Todd Blanche and the Executive Office for Immigration Review. They deny Dillon’s claim as “patently false.”

Dillon’s case is a reaffirmation of one of the most defining dynamics of the second Trump administration: You must be a loyalist to keep your job.

A Florida county’s mail-in ballot envelope design was almost rejected by the U.S. Postal Service for less than two-hundredths of an inch.

Leon County, Florida’s mail ballot envelope design placed the words “return service requested” 0.236 inches away from its election office’s return address, when it was supposed to be a quarter-inch, leading the USPS to reject it on September 2, the Tallahassee Democrat reports. The county’s supervisor of elections, Mark Earley, called it “ridiculous.”

After Earley’s office filed an appeal, the envelope design was eventually accepted.

“After several requests to postal employees today, I was granted a temporary certification for my envelopes in case the rule goes into effect. If the rule does not go into effect, then my envelopes are completely fine. So either way, we are good this election!” Earley told the Democrat in an email, referring to new USPS design rules resulting from President Trump’s executive order restricting voting by mail.

The egregious rejection raises questions about how mail-in ballots will be handled if the Supreme Court allows the rule to go ahead following a legal challenge from multiple states and municipalities, including some led by Republicans.

“The chaos factor is the real problem,” Earley, who has joined the court challenges, told the Democrat. “I’ve had voters tell me ‘I don’t trust anything anymore, so I’m just not going to vote.’ And so I say the only way that your vote doesn’t get counted is if you don’t try and vote.”

If the county had not been granted a reprieve, Leon County would have been stuck, as a statute requires ballots to be sent out to the county’s voters by September 24, a deadline that is too soon to create new envelopes. Earley told the newspaper that “these exact same envelopes have been used to mail many tens of thousands of ballots to Leon County voters in the 2024 elections and in the 2026 primary election without incident.”

According to Earley, he submitted the envelopes to USPS at its request, but many elections offices in Florida had not taken that step. That is probably true of many other elections offices across the country, and the postal service could end up finding fault with their mail-in ballots and envelopes, leading to chaos, conspiracy theories, and disputed results in November. Is that Trump’s goal?