President Donald Trump's recent excuse that vandals were at fault for the peeling paint at the bottom of the recently renovated Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool raised red flags for his niece.
During a press conference on Monday, Trump denied that the contractors who undertook the roughly $15 million renovation project were responsible for the poor conditions and algae that spread throughout the pool. Instead, Trump claimed people were vandalizing the pool and threatened to imprison anyone caught vandalizing it for up to 10 years.
Mary Trump, a psychologist and author, argued in a new Substack essay that Trump's excuse illustrates a familiar pattern of behavior with her uncle.
"Apparently, renovating now means ruining something, and vandalism means pointing it out," Mary Trump wrote. "It is a familiar pattern in the Trump era. When something falls apart because of corruption, incompetence, or poor planning, the people responsible rarely face scrutiny. Instead, attention shifts to whoever notices the failure first."
Trump has consistently sought to deflect blame for the Reflecting Pool renovation project as criticism of it has increased. So far, his administration has arrested at least five people suspected of vandalizing the pool, although none of them have been convicted.
"If we are truly interested in identifying who is responsible for the damage, perhaps we should begin with Donald himself," Mary Trump added. "After all, he is responsible not only for the vandalism of the Reflecting Pool, but increasingly for the vandalism of Washington."
"He is taking a wrecking ball to the East Wing," she continued. "The Ellipse, where he held his grotesque and embarrassingly vulgar UFC spectacle on his birthday, looks more like a construction site than a historic civic space. The giant arch he wants to build threatens the balance of a city that was carefully designed over centuries. And then there is the gilded ballroom, a monument to excess that somehow grows more expensive every time somebody talks about it."
"The deeper issue is not the architecture. It is the assumption that Donald has the right to do any of this," she added.
