A damning report has exposed how President Donald Trump’s rush to fix the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool was doomed from the start, with the complicated $14 million renovation project overseen by the manager of one of the president’s golf clubs.

In the president’s relentless pursuit to overhaul the Washington, D.C. landmark, among others, the Trump administration was willing to “skirt laws, expend millions of dollars, ignore facts and punish truth tellers” to get the job done, according to The New York Times, which reports excruciating new details about the botched renovation project.

Shortly after Trump declared the project complete in early June, the “American flag blue” lining of the pool began to peel, with pieces floating to the surface of the water, which had also turned green due to a years-long algae problem that returned. Trump blamed “vandals” for the damage, which Washington’s top federal prosecutor Jeanine Pirro concluded last week was the “result of a flawed installation by the contractor” in a stunning reversal.

The project began its ill-fated course when the president tapped David Schutzenhofer, the manager of the Trump Organization’s Bedminster golf club in New Jersey, who “played an off-the-books role in government decisions” with “no formal training in engineering or architecture,” according to the newspaper.

While Trump claimed on April 23 that he had called up “three of these people that have worked for me in the past doing swimming pools,” Schutzenhofer was the one who sourced the companies that were ultimately awarded the no-bid government contracts to carry out the work, the Times reports.

The White House did not answer questions about Schutzenhofer’s role in the project when reached for comment. “For years, the Reflecting Pool sat neglected, plagued with algae and leaking millions of gallons of water. Fixing it was common sense,” spokeswoman Taylor Rogers said. “It’s another example of President Trump restoring our nation’s capital for the American people.”

After being tapped by Trump around Thanksgiving last year to “lead” efforts in finding solutions on how to fix the Reflecting Pool’s long-running problems, Schutzenhofer went to the Las Vegas World Concrete trade show in January 2026.

There, he met Rodney Jarboe, the president of a Missouri-based company, Creative Polymers, that had previously worked on the Gateway Arch in St Louis, a federal monument.

Jarboe told the Times that Schutzenhofer “made clear that the work would be rushed” and Trump wanted it complete for the Fourth of July celebrations. “It was a very tight deadline to make a decision,” Jarboe said.

Schutzenhofer was reportedly the one who settled on the idea of coating the pool’s concrete slabs with a polyurea liner, a type of waterproof coating, and partnered with another firm, Rhino Linings, which was the company touting the “American flag blue” shade of lining that “delighted” the president.

Jarboe’s firm reportedly partnered with Rhino Linings due to a shortage of materials thanks to Trump’s tariffs, he told the Times. “Tariffs were reducing the amount of materials that could come into the U.S. to make this stuff.”

Rhino also enlisted the help of Atlantic Industrial Coatings to apply the coating, and the Interior Department approved the no-bid contract.

To address the pool’s algae issue, which had since returned, Schutzensofer reached out to an Ohio-based company called Greenwater Services, reportedly owned by Trump’s donor’s investment firm. The firm was approved to supply the nanobubbler equipment to kill the algae.

The Interior Department issued another no-bid contract to Greenwater, “bypass[ing] consultations with preservationists and other experts, even though a career employee said the project was significant enough to require it,” the Times noted.

Atlantic’s request to be paid a 20 percent profit margin was also granted by the Interior Department, according to the newspaper, with the department citing the looming July 4 deadline “as a reason to block any scrutiny” over the no-bid contracts.

Trump released a video statement from the Oval Office on April 23, where he told the American people of the plans.

“What we're going to do is I'm going to call all three of these people that have worked for me in the past doing swimming pools,” Trump said, claiming he had found the contractors himself. “That's all they can do is a swimming pool." And I said, ‘Give me a good price. We can do it for maybe a million and a half to $2 million as opposed $300 million.’”

His statement was characterized as “an elaborate story” by the Times. The White House referred The Independent to the president’s remarks on April 24, where he told reporters in the Oval Office he selected “taking the best” of the contractors he has previously worked with on his real estate developments.

“I said, I have a guy who's unbelievable at doing swimming pools up the road. We have a club. We have an Olympic-size swimming pool. He did it 20 years ago,” Trump said, referring to his Washington, D.C. golf club in Virginia. “So I asked him, I said, ‘I have an idea. I'm going to send my contractor over and take a look.’”

The president went on to say that the contractor talked him into the “American flag blue” lining. “He talked me into it very easily,” Trump said, adding that he was told the lining would last “30, 40, 50 years.”

However, the main contractor on the job, Atlantic, had never worked at the president’s Virginia club or at any other Trump property, the Times reports. A month later, Trump said he didn’t know the contractor and had never used them before.

“I didn’t give out the contract, “Interior” did, to a contractor I did not know, and have never used before,” Trump said in a May 12 Truth Social post.

Once the project was deemed complete in June, the problems began to emerge, culminating in a blame game that saw members of the public, including former Olympian David Hearn, arrested on vandalism charges.

Pirro last week moved to dismiss criminal charges against Hearn in a court filing that stated the damaged lining of the pool “was the result of a botched installation and not vandalism.”

The former New York prosecutor and Fox News personality incurred the wrath of the president. “She said there was no vandalism. There was tremendous vandalism,” he said Thursday. “So, she made a terrible mistake. I don’t understand why she did such a stupid thing.”

Trump has continued to blame vandals despite Pirro’s findings, a narrative being “pushed” by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, according to the Times, citing two White House officials. Interior spokeswoman Katie Martin said that Burgum “never misled the president and was very clear in all of his comments on the pool.”

The same spokeswoman continued to push the vandalism narrative in a statement to the newspaper. “President Donald J. Trump is an expert builder who fixed the Reflecting Pool permanently before deranged people vandalized it,” Martin said.