President Donald Trump is back at it with one of his favorite pastimes: going after ABC News. This time the target is anchor David Muir, whom the president affectionately refers to as "shaky," over the network's reporting on the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. As The American Tribune reported, Trump took to Truth Social with a couple of posts that read like a man who really, really wants you to know the difference between peeling paint and vandalism.
The Reflecting Pool was drained again after a recent renovation, and images circulating on social media showed the pool partially emptied. The administration claims the pool's lining was deliberately slashed by leftist vandals. ABC News, according to Trump, attributed the draining to peeling paint and algae blooms. The president was not having it.
"ABC Fake News and its shaky anchor, David Muir, said that the Reflecting Pool was drained to address Peeling Paint (there is no paint, it was slashed with a knife, or box cutter, high grade colored waterproofing liner – it was VANDALISM!) and Algae Blooms (also caused by Vandals, but removed long ago!)," Trump wrote. He added, "In other words, the story was FAKE NEWS, but heavily slanted away from the real cause of the problem, Vandalism. It will be fixed soon, and better than ever."
The president also touted that 60 monuments and fountains in Washington, D.C. have been cleaned and renovated, and that crime is at record lows. "Washington has never looked better, or been safer!" he declared, which is the kind of statement that probably makes longtime D.C. residents do a slow blink.
In a separate post, Trump described the alleged vandalism in detail, claiming the slashes were 300 yards long and that the pool's floor was "cut and then pulled upward, with great force, by these thugs." He called the alleged perpetrators "Country hating sleazebags" who "should pay a big price for the damage done." Not exactly diplomatic language, but then again, diplomacy has never really been the brand.
This is far from the first round between Trump and ABC News. The president secured a $16 million settlement in a defamation lawsuit against the network in 2024, so you could say the relationship has been strained for a while now. Calling it a "beef" might actually be generous. It is more like a full blown rivalry at this point, except only one side seems to be enjoying it.
Truth Social commenters, naturally, piled on. One user questioned where the FCC is in all of this. Another praised Trump for being the only president to care about maintaining national monuments. A third called for jail time for news outlets that lie, which is certainly one approach to media criticism. And someone else dismissed Muir as "a lying propagandist," which is probably not going on his Emmy reel.
Say what you will about the man, but nobody turns a drained pool into a multi-post social media event quite like Donald Trump.
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