Interior Secretary Doug Burgum: Reflecting Pool repair involves 'multiple gashes' by vandals
This story raises questions about governance, accountability, and American values.
Three hundred fifty feet of gashes in a liner that was just redone. That's not a stray scuff from a skateboard or a rowdy tourist tossing a bottle. Doug Burgum called them "multiple gashes," plural, which tells you this took some doing.
New Republican Times Editorial Board
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said Sunday that the renovated Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool suffered "multiple gashes" to the industrial liner that add up to 350 feet of damage.
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New Republican Times Editorial Board
Three hundred fifty feet of gashes in a liner that was just redone. That's not a stray scuff from a skateboard or a rowdy tourist tossing a bottle. Doug Burgum called them "multiple gashes," plural, which tells you this took some doing. Somebody worked at it.
The Reflecting Pool isn't just a puddle between two monuments. It's the backdrop for every march, every speech, every photo that tries to capture what this country is supposed to be about. Cutting up the liner underneath it is the kind of vandalism that costs real money and takes real time to fix, all so someone could make a point nobody asked them to make on a shared public space.
We keep hearing that property destruction is just noise, a byproduct of passion. It isn't. It's a bill taxpayers pay and a memorial that gets closed off while crews patch what somebody else decided to wreck. Burgum putting a number on it, 350 feet, is useful. It turns a vague controversy into a fact people can actually picture.
Whoever did this should be found and made to answer for it, not treated as background noise in someone else's cause.
Commentary written with AI assistance by the New Republican Times Editorial Board.