White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt just returned to work, and she’s already embroiled in President Donald Trump’s reflecting pool drama. Trump’s reflecting pool renovation project — which he spent $14 million on, by the way — has been getting a lot of attention lately.
The president has been focused on the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool’s color, claiming that “it never had the color people wanted.” He promised to make it “American Flag Blue” and said it would be “much more beautiful than the day it was built.”
But shortly after the renovation project was completed and the pool was filled with water, algae turned the water green. Now that people are talking about the Reflecting Pool issue, Leavitt is blaming “the liberal media” for making it a thing. But critics think she only has her boss to blame for this.
Leavitt suggested that the “liberal media” has questionable priorities.
So true, and so sad. The liberal media is truly deranged. https://t.co/1eDzW6riqV
— Karoline Leavitt (@karolineleavitt) June 20, 2026
On X, she re-shared a post from commentator Brilyn Hollyhand that read, “The reflecting pool has gotten more coverage than: -Somalian daycare fraud -Laken Riley’s murder -Biden’s mental health decline.”
Leavitt added her own thoughts when she re-posted it. “So true, and so sad,” she wrote. “The liberal media is truly deranged.”
But this isn’t going over well for her.
People responded to Leavitt’s post by explaining to her that the Trump administration made this story a thing all on its own. After all, Trump has been bragging about the renovation project for months now. Earlier this month, he held up a large sign that compared the pool to different skyscrapers. The poster read, “Our Pool is Bigger than Skyscrapers.”
So, perhaps, if the Trump administration didn’t want the Reflecting Pool to become a big story, they could’ve refrained from doing things like that. Many of the critics who responded to Leavitt’s post made the argument that if you don’t want people to keep talking about something, you should probably stop drawing attention to it all the time.
“I know you’ve been gone but do you recognize this guy who literally had a chart made up to brag about his huge success?” one critic responded to her, sharing an image of Trump holding up his chart just in case she missed it.
Isn’t attention what the Trump administration wanted?
“I thought Trump wanted his pool ‘upgrade’ all over the news…” someone else wrote.
“Could it be that people are talking about it because Trump spent weeks and weeks talking about how big this project was and how important it was to his administration?” another critic proposed. “He literally paraded this picture around for days, bragging about the project. Y’all created this newscycle.”
As many critics pointed out, Trump admin officials didn’t seem to have any issue with people talking about the pool renovation project when they saw it as a success story. In spite of everything else going on in the world, Trump was eager to talk about the Reflecting Pool. Now that obvious issues have come to light, they’re acting like people shouldn’t be talking about it.
One critic illustrated this by writing, “Trump: look at the pool, I fixed it. Everyone look at the pool, I did a great job. Obama never fixed the pool. I did. Look at the pool. Media: the pool looks broken. Karoline: why are you guys talking about the pool, you’re deranged.”
Some people agreed that people are too focused on the pool — but not in the way that Leavitt was suggesting. “as you say, it’s getting way too much coverage,” someone commented. “in part because president trump spent too much time on it when he should have been talking about more important issues.”
