Ryan Bort
Contact Ryan Bort on X View all posts by Ryan Bort May 12, 2026
Donald Trump speaks at the White House in Washington, D.C., on May 11, 2026. Kent Nishimura/AFP/Getty Images Donald Trump had another episode on social media ahead of a critical state visit to China this week. The president posted to Truth Social dozens of times overnight and into Tuesday morning, railing against prominent Democrats like Barack Obama and Joe Biden, pushing false claims about the 2020 election, and imagining himself on the $100 bill, along with several other bizarre posts.
Trump is posting absolutely deranged shit on social media this morning ahead of departing for China today. Get a load of this stuff. pic.twitter.com/mkCU033AYa
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 12, 2026
Trump also promoted his latest pet project, refinishing the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. “Democrats Love Sewage,” read one post featuring an AI image of Obama, Biden, and Nancy Pelosi bathing in a fetid Reflecting Pool covered in waste. In another, he wrote a lengthy screed bashing The New York Times for its coverage of the project, particularly a story published Monday about how it’s going to cost taxpayers several times more than what Trump promised.
“This is not just a paint job, like lowlife ‘reporter,’ David Fahrenthold, of the NYT so inaccurately and maliciously stated, it is a deeply complicated work of smart and beautiful construction,” the president wrote, after claiming that “many patriots” had asked him to fix the Reflecting Pool, which he says had been “an embarrassment to Washington, D.C., and to our Country, itself” due to mismanagement by Obama and Biden.
“I didn’t give out the contract, ‘Interior’ did, to a contractor I did not know, and have never used before,” Trump concluded, despite having previously claimed that he selected the contractor because they had worked on the swimming pool at one of his golf clubs.
The Times reported on Monday that though Trump said the contractor was only charging the government $1.8 million to redo to the pool and paint its bottom blue, the Interior Department last week doubled the size of the contract and now planned to pay the company nearly $14 million. The government is typically required to hold a competitive bidding projects for contract work, but the Trump administration gave Atlantic Industrial Coatings a no-bid contract to renovate the pool, arguing that the project was too urgent to waste time with a bidding process. Trump wrote in his Truth Social post on Tuesday that the project would cost “5 or 6 Million Dollars” and be done in two weeks.
