Atlantic Industrial Coatings now says its own repair work helped cause the Reflecting Pool liner to peel and tear, undercutting the vandalism story Donald Trump had pushed for weeks. In a 14 August report, and again with more detail in early September, the company said flaws in the repair plan and human oversight led to the failure at the Lincoln Memorial site.
The contractor had been given a $14.7m no-bid contract to renovate the pool, and the work was rushed to finish before the nation’s 250th anniversary celebrations on 4 July. That speed mattered. Atlantic said crews did not spray enough primer in some places to bond the liner properly, and that two chemicals specified for separate layers ended up being incompatible.
The result was a material failure, not the kind of random destruction Trump described. When the top chemical was sprayed, it became hotter than the layer below could tolerate, causing the material underneath to blister and separate. A federal court filing later said information supplied by the Interior Department showed the damage came from a flawed installation and the rush to meet the deadline, not vandalism.
That finding sits uneasily beside the government’s first response. The Justice Department charged several people with vandalizing the pool in early July, and prosecutors began moving to dismiss those cases on 31 July. Yet an Interior Department spokesperson still blamed major vandalism for the damage, even after Atlantic’s report pointed in the opposite direction. The White House referred questions to the Interior Department.
Trump himself had already signaled some retreat from his original line. Last month, he wrote on Truth Social that there was also some contractor error done by rushing the job, but said the contractor’s damage was limited to a very small area and was relatively inconsequential. Atlantic says it will repair the pool again under the project’s warranty. What remains unresolved is how a design that was not previously tested, and was shaped in part by the general manager of one of Trump’s golf clubs, was approved for a federal project of this scale.
