Trump calls the Reflecting Pool a swimming pool, then says only Italians know more about stone

At a Saturday night rally in Perry, Georgia, that was supposed to be about the state’s Senate and governor races, Trump took a detour to brief the crowd on the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. “It was built in 1922, and it hasn’t worked ever. It leaked,” he said. “You know, it’s the longest swimming pool in history. It’s like, it goes all the way from Lincoln to George Washington.” It’s a reflecting pool. The clue is in the name. Please do not swim in it.

“And we had tremendous vandalism,” he added. That’s the story he has been telling since the pool’s new liner began peeling. Federal prosecutors dropped the vandalism cases and later described the problem as a botched installation, WTOP reports. Documents obtained by The New York Times show the contractor didn’t apply enough primer in places and used two chemicals that turned out to be incompatible, and the company says it will fix the work under warranty. The government paid $14.7 million for the job, per WTOP. We covered his first go at the vandalism story in September.

Then he moved on to statues and stone: the “red spray paint,” and the statuary marble, “not that strong a stone, but beautiful, but it sort of sucks it in.” Then came the credentials. “You know, I know more about stone than any human being outside of Italy. Only the Italians know a little bit more. We brought them in to help us, if that’s okay.”

A small note for the man who knows more about stone than anyone outside Italy. The Lincoln statue at the far end of that “swimming pool” is 28 blocks of Georgia white marble, the National Park Service says, carved by the Piccirilli brothers, Italian immigrants working out of a studio in the Bronx. He was in Georgia. Nobody mentioned it.