The Media Research Center’s Trump Regime Media mode on President Trump’s botched fix on the Reflecting Pool continued in Nicholas Fondacaro’s June 23 hate-watch of “The View”:
Alongside such braindead takes as Jill Biden being a “hell of a doctor” and “the Holocaust isn’t about race,” ABC News moderator Whoopi Goldberg added to her lexicon during Monday’s edition of The View when she insanely claimed the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool “never had algae before” President Trump’s renovation. A take, which got support from the other members of the cast.
Amid laughter from her, the rest of the Cackling Coven, and their audience of liberals, Goldberg downplayed the arrest of five alleged vandals and suggested it was Trump who vandalized the pool and beamed at the idea of him being sentenced to prison for 10 years over it:
[…]For Goldberg, the renovation was the vandalism. She even suggested that the renovation was illegal because it should have been a national referendum voted on by everyone, and she wanted everyone to sue Trump over it.
Portraying the arrests as Trump picking five random people on the National Mall to target for prosecution, Goldberg and faux conservative Alyssa Farah Griffin claimed there was no evidence of vandalism:
Given what we know now, Fartah Griffin was right — there was no evidence of vandalism.
Joseph Vazquez clung to the bogus vandalism narrative in a June 26 post:
The Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos may have instituted free market reforms to the lefty newspaper’s opinion section, but its obsession with injecting climate change drivel into news coverage remains intact. This time, the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool algae nonstory is getting the eco-treatment.
Post climate reporter Sarah Kaplan released an idiotic take June 25 on the paint peeling and algae bloom currently plaguing the iconic pool, “Why Trump’s algae problem is much bigger than the Reflecting Pool.” It showed up in Friday’s paper on the front of the Metro section.
She railed that Trump “has overlooked the real cause of unsightly — and often dangerous — algal blooms,” which given her history, had to be “pollution and climate change.” It couldn’t possibly have anything to do with vandals allegedly damaging the foam sealant by cutting one of the liners in the pool as the U.S. National Park Service suggested just a day after Kaplan’s piece went live, right? Talk about timing!
Curtis Houck whined the same say:
Because he’s not a cable TV fixture, Washington Post arts and architecture critic Philip Kennicott can fly under the radar as one of the most unhinged sufferers of Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS). But stories like one that ran in Thursday’s print edition illustrated his TDS as he raged about Trump “disturb[ing]” the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, “one of the most serene places” in D.C. serving as “a balance between beauty and function” that now “doesn’t reflect well on democracy.”
“At the Reflecting Pool, Trump turns a serene oasis into a police zone; The botched renovation and images of arrests strike at the heart of the president’s supposed reputation for competence,” read the online headline and subhead.
Suddenly, the left and Washington denizens have decided the Reflecting Pool is the be all, end all symbol of the National Mall.
[…]The next day, Kennicott’s Style section colleague Monica Hesse sarcastically wrote “[t]he best show on television or any other screen right now is Reflecting Pool,” name-checking CBS, EarthCam, Fox News, TikTok, YouTube, and “social media” writ large.
“Reflecting Pool has everything. It’s a drama. It’s a farce. It’s a whodunit. It’s a murder mystery. The victims are ducks. Reflecting Pool is entertainingly low stakes because it is not, for example, a war,” she quipped.
She later added: “To watch Reflecting Pool is to bear witness to both the behaviors of your government and of your fellow citizens. To see what they are willing to believe. Who they are willing to blame.”
Exit question: If the press think it’s ludicrous for the President to be fixated on the Reflecting Pool, why is it that they’ve dumped hours of coverage on it and treated its state like a death in the family?
But we thought that the MRC believed the media should devote hours of coverage to anything that Trump fixates on. What changed? Is it because it didn’t work out to his benefit?
Bill D’Agostino updated a study on coverage that he did a few days earlier:
The news media’s obsession with the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting pool has continued apace. Earlier this week, we found that TV news had spent almost seven hours on the story in just the past nine days. As of Friday morning June 25, that total has reached almost ten hours across left-wing cable (CNN and MSNBC) and broadcast networks (ABC, CBS, and NBC).
MRC analysts looked at all reflecting pool coverage on major left-wing cable and broadcast networks from June 14 through the morning of June 26, 2026. In just that 12-day period, the story received 579 minutes and 31 seconds of coverage, or an average of over 48 minutes per day.
While our previous totals found that CNN was uniquely obsessed with the condition of the reflecting pool, MS NOW has since overtaken them, with a grand total of 269 minutes and 50 seconds. Incredibly, MS NOW has run an absurd 108 minutes on the reflecting pool in just the last three days.
Again, D’Agostino refused to include Fox News in his study — presumably because so he wouldn’t have to admit the pro-Trump nature of that coverage.
Jorge Bonilla served up his own complaint in a July 2 post:
The indictment against the man accused of defacing the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool was a unique opportunity for algae to return to the Elitist Media evening news after a one-day break. ABC took this as an opportunity to indulge their reflexive Trump derangement, and practically blame him for the defacement.
[…]The framing gives the game away, with anchor David Muir engaging in another one of his overly long introductions that could have served as its own brief, before tossing to Mary Bruce who then repeats most of it. The emphasis was to be placed on the cost of the initial repair. Still, Vazquez clung to the discredited narrative, huffing in a July 16 post that “lefty networks ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN and MS NOW spent almost 10 hours (579 minutes and 31 seconds) of news coverage trying to make the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool algae affair — which has since been linked to criminal vandalization— the political offense of the 21st century.”
Chief White House Correspondent Mary Bruce, formerly Joe Biden’s chief sycophant, parrots that point before knocking Trump for not blaming the contractors that worked on the Reflecting Pool. Anything but blaming, perhaps, the people who vandalized and pulled up portions of the lining that, as ABC has made abundantly clear, cost the American taxpayer $16 million dollars.
In fact, charges against the main person accused of vandalism, former Olympian David Hearn, have been dropped. Bonilla didn’t update his post to reflect that fact. A July 11 post by intern Siena Do also lacks that update:
The left’s response to President Trump has involved tearing up anything even remotely connected to him. From firebombing Teslas to ripping down Trump’s name on the Kennedy Center, the rule still stands: if the orange man touched it, they hate it.
The most egregious example of this new left-wing phenomenon is the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, which Trump had renovated earlier this summer. After its completion, several arrests were made when people allegedly tore off chunks of American-flag-blue paint from the side of the pool. Clearly, those were acts of vandalism, but on Thursday’s The 11th Hour, MS NOW guest host Symone Sanders-Townsend somehow came to a different conclusion: the administration arrested those poor people for living ordinary lives.
The Justice Department just charged three people, including former Olympic canoeist David Hearn, with misdemeanor destruction of property. According to Hearn’s charge, he allegedly caused about $1,000 worth of damage to the Reflecting Pool’s new coat of paint. But the arrests of Hearn and other accused vandals, according to Sanders-Townsend, had a “chilling effect,” because “any American can be arrested for just about anything.”
Wrong. The police can’t arrest anyone for “just about anything.” They can only arrest if they have a reasonable suspicion that you committed a crime. Besides, in what world are people going about ripping paint off pool walls as part of their everyday routine?
But that didn’t happen — in fact, the Trump administration has admitted that contractor error, not vandalism, is the reason the Reflecting Pool issues.