President Donald Trump somehow managed to work his favorite scapegoat into an unhinged rant about the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool on Monday after a reporter pressed him on the cost.
When asked why Trump claimed in April that the renovations would cost only $1 million and be completed in a week, the president gave an answer that befuddled critics on social media.
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“In April, you showed us pictures of what you were going to do when you said you had a guy who was going to do it in a week for about a million dollars,” CBS News senior White House correspondent Ed O’Keefe asked Trump.
“Okay. Ready. Barack Hussein Obama, have you ever heard of him?” Trump asked.
“Yeah,” O’Keefe responded.
“He spent two years and over $100 million on trying to fix it. You know what happened to it? Never even opened,” Trump said. “He took the water for the river, you know about that, right? It turned out to be putrid and it destroyed the whole thing. Spent over 100 million, him and Biden together spent $147 million. You know what happened? Never opened. You don’t mention that, right?”
Trump ranted for nearly two minutes, throwing out figures with no evidence to back them. His claims that Obama and Biden spent $147 million on Reflecting Pool renovations had no basis in reality, according to an analysis by The Associated Press.
Obama’s two-year renovation of the monument ended in 2012 and cost about $34 million, per AP. The Biden administration did not conduct any major work on the Reflecting Pool.
Critics were quick to question why Trump was attempting to cast blame on Obama for the current fiasco, which has seen the president’s prized “American flag blue” paint peeling off and copious amounts of algae forming just weeks after the pool was refilled:
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