The Interior Department added $6.2 million to the no-bid contract for repairs to the Lincoln Memorial pool late last week.
Atlantic Industrial Coatings was hired to repair leaking joints between the pool’s concrete slabs, waterproof the pool’s bottom and paint it a shade called “American flag blue.”Credit…Al Drago for The New York Times
President Trump said that his handpicked contractor would charge only $1.8 million to repair the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool and paint it blue.
The actual cost is now more than seven times that, after the Interior Department nearly doubled the size of the contract late last week, federal records show.
On Friday, the Interior Department added $6.2 million to the contract’s previous cost, saying it now planned to pay $13.1 million to a Virginia firm called Atlantic Industrial Coatings. President Trump said he chose that company to repair the landmark because the firm had worked on the swimming pools at his golf club in Sterling, Va.
The government awarded that firm a no-bid contract last month, bypassing the requirement to seek competing offers by saying that the situation was so urgent that any delay would cause “serious injury” to the government. The government has not publicly said what that injury would have been.
Instead, it has cited Mr. Trump’s desire to get the work done before the country’s 250th birthday on July 4.
Public contracting records do not say why the contract’s cost increased so sharply on Friday. Katie Martin, a spokeswoman for the Interior Department, said that the higher price “reflects the effort necessary to expedite the timeline of completing the leak prevention coating project — more people, more materials, more equipment and longer hours ahead of our 250th.”
Atlantic Industrial Coatings did not respond to questions about the increase.
But government documents obtained by The New York Times show that the contract’s current value matches, down to the dollar, an offer submitted to the government by Atlantic Industrial Coatings in the middle of last month. That offer included a 20 percent profit margin, the documents show.
Competitive bidding laws aim to ensure that the government is getting a fair price from its vendors.
Image
“Every day that the resurfacing continues, the historic character of the Reflecting Pool is being further and fundamentally altered,” a lawsuit filed Monday said.Credit…Al Drago for The New York Times
The contractor was hired to repair leaking joints between the pool’s concrete slabs, waterproof the pool’s bottom, and paint it a shade called “American flag blue.”
The pool has also been troubled for decades by leaks and algae blooms that turn its water green.
On Monday, a nonprofit dedicated to landscape architecture filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Washington seeking to halt the paint job. The Cultural Landscape Foundation said that the Trump administration had ignored a law requiring advance scrutiny of projects that alter historic landmarks.
The foundation, based in Washington, said in its lawsuit that “every day that the resurfacing continues, the historic character of the Reflecting Pool is being further and fundamentally altered.”
David A. Fahrenthold is a Times investigative reporter writing about nonprofit organizations. He has been a reporter for two decades.
Doral Trump statue sculptor Alan Cottrill says no other commission has been as chaotic.Golden statue photo by Orlando Ramirez/Getty Images; overlaid photo from Alan Cottrill. New Times photo collage.
A towering, gold-leaf statue of President Donald Trump was unveiled with great fanfare on Wednesday at Trump National Doral golf course, in a dedication ceremony that included a prayer from a MAGA-aligned pastor who put the president on speakerphone. But the artist behind it had choice words when asked about the two-year creation process.
“This was a clusterfuck,” Ohio-based sculptor Alan Cottrill tells New Times.
From his foundry in Zanesville (about an hour east of Columbus), Cottrill has worked on hundreds of commissioned statues now standing across the country, including multiple at the Ohio State University. But never has a commission been as chaotic as the crypto bro-funded, gold-leafed, looksmaxxed Trump unveiled this week at Trump’s golf club, he says.
“I usually deal with people that have everything organized. From the start, this was chaos,” Cottrill says. “I have 400 life-size or larger statues around the country. The patron sets a date when they want it installed, and I have it installed on that date. And almost never, anytime whatsoever, does anyone miss a payment, because I always do what I say I’ll do, and the patron always does what they say they’re going to.”
That wasn’t the case with the 15-foot (22 feet when you include the platform) Trump statue. Demands to nix the turkey neck and make the model skinnier, missed payments, and calls to install the statue last-minute — no Cottrill commission has been as complicated as the statue dubbed “Don Colossus.”
The statue in question, seen near the ninth tee during the first round of the Cadillac Championship 2026 at Trump National Doral Miami on April 30 in Doral.
Tech bros Ashley Sansalone (a cryptocurrency developer based in Canada) and Dustin Stockton (a Republican strategist) teamed up with a group of other crypto bros to pay Cottrill $500,000 for the creation of a Trump statue based on the fist pump he gave after the July 2024 assassination attempt in Pennsylvania. If Stockon’s name sounds familiar, it’s because authorities raided his property in connection with allegations that he was involved in defrauding donors of former Trump advisor Steve Bannon’s effort to crowdfund the southern border wall in Trump’s first term.
Sansalone and Stockton didn’t respond to New Times‘ requests for comment. But Stockton told the U.K paper The Times that the group did not agree with the sculptor’s description of what happened.
From Clay Clump to 15-Foot Trump
Cottrill, an Army veteran and founder of an international pizza chain, was in his late 30s when he touched clay for the first time and declared, “This is the mistress I’ve traveled the world in search of,” as he puts it in his website bio.
“Well, I tell people it’s kinda like the first time I kissed a girl. The minute I did that, man, that’s all I wanted to do,” Cottrill tells New Times.
From there, Cottrill built a business that’s attracted more than 500 commissions, with most standing in public places throughout the nation. In 2024, he got the call about making a giant Trump statue. The group of cryptocurrency acolytes, Stockton told The Times, was to highlight “one of the most iconic moments and to show our appreciation of his embrace of crypto.”
He said the group was in agreement: “If we are going to do this, we had to make it Trumpian.” Also, it had to look like gold.
When asked by New Times about his political leanings and whether he was excited by the commission request, Cottrill says, “No comment.”
The process of molding skinny Trump began with a life-sized clay model that wasn’t quite to the liking of Cottrill’s patrons, he said.
“I had him even skinnier than he is, a little bit. I knew they’d want that,” Cottrill said about the first model. “They said, ‘Oh, he’s too big.’ I’m close enough to his age, and I got some turkey neck going on, and I knew what that was. That’s what happens when you’re almost 80.”
Perhaps the only photo you’ll ever see of Trump fist-pumping in front of a pride flag. Photo from Alan Cottrill
Cottrill says it actually only took him four-and-a-half months to make the 50 pieces he’d put together to make the giant Trump. It took another year and a half, however, for the installation at Trump National Doral to happen because it took weeks for Sansalone and Stockton to make their final $90,000 payment.
The tech bros in 2024 paid an initial $300,000 for the initial statue, then paid another $60,000 a year later for the gold-leaf plating, and another $150,000 to use imagery of the statue to promote a crypto token, Cottrill said. But getting the payment was easier said than done.
“‘You were supposed to make these payments nearly a year ago. I can’t trust you to do that,’” Cottrill recalls telling his patrons. “So I held the statue. I put it in an undisclosed location and said it won’t be delivered until the final payments have been made.
“Like I told the crypto guys from the beginning, I said, ‘Hey, I don’t fuck around, so you don’t fuck around with me.’ And, like my daughter said, ‘They fucked around and found out.’”
After months of holding the statue hostage, the final payment finally came on April 22 with a phone call saying Cottrill had to have the statue installed the next day, ahead of the 2026 Cadillac Championship that ran April 30 to May 3.
“So I got in a truck with my foundry manager and we drove straight down and when we got to dropoff, we were told that we need this installed and all the gold leaf touched up by dawn tomorrow,” Cottrill said. “We usually would take three days to do all that, so we worked through the night till 4 a.m., and we finally finished. Then we slept two or three hours, got in the truck, and drove 18 hours straight back to Zanesville.”
Cottrill high-tailed it out of South Florida because he wasn’t actually invited to the unveiling and dedication ceremony that followed (another first for the sculptor).
When asked if Cottrill would ever work with the crypto bros or Trump’s team again, specifically for the upcoming Trump Presidential Tower in Miami, which, according to renderings, will include a large, gold-leaf Trump statue, he didn’t need to hear the full question before responding, “Fuck no.”
“Once somebody has shown that they can’t be trusted to do what they say,” he adds, “you don’t work with them anymore.”
Trump himself appeared to be pleased, writing on his platform Truth Social, “The Real Deal – GOLD – At Doral in Miami. Put there by great American Patriots!!! President DJT” However, the sculptor tells New Times, “don’t forget it’s just a normal bronze statue with a coating of gold leaf over the entire thing.”
A lot of gold leaf: “There were over 3000 3in.² leaves of 23.75 carat gold attached to the surface to cover the entire 15 foot statue,” he adds.
B. Scott McLendon joined New Times staff in 2025. A national award-winning journalist, he previously covered education, crime, courts, and local government for daily newspapers in Alabama, Louisiana, and Texas. He holds a bachelor’s in journalism from Troy University.
This was a private event held and paid for by the group for a set amount of time at the park. It is a normal occurrence at parks like this. If this had been a Christian church doing the event it would have caused no backlash and been accepted. But because it was a Muslim sponcered event with mostly clothing of this sect of the Islamic faith that also encouraged the eating of foods not normally eaten by Christians it caused a backlash of Islamophobia. Hate for people and customs different from the Christian religion practiced by white people is common in the nearly theocratic Texas. Hugs
The park is available for rent at a cost of $5,000 an hour, Dallas News reported.
A private event at a Texas city-owned water park has been canceled following backlash and a direct threat by Gov. Greg Abbott to withhold more than $500,000 in state public safety funding.
A spokesperson for the City of Grand Prairie said Thursday the city canceled the DFW Epic Eid Celebration scheduled for June 1 at the Epic Waters Indoor Waterpark.
“After further review and in the best interest of the City of Grand Prairie, the June 1 Eid event at Epic Waters Indoor Waterpark has been canceled,” the spokesperson said.
The event at the city-owned waterpark was initially promoted with flyers describing it as “Muslims only” and included a modest dress code requiring burkinis for women, halal food, a private prayer room and rules encouraging attendees to maintain personal space and “lower the gaze.”
After backlash on social media, organizers updated promotional materials to state that “all are welcome,” provided attendees follow the modest dress code.
Abbott’s Public Safety Office shared a letter with The Christian Post that had been sent to Grand Prairie Mayor Ron Jensen warning that the “DFW Epic Eid” event “was publicly and openly advertised as discriminating based on religion” and therefore violated agreements between the city and the Public Safety Office.
The letter from Public Safety Office Executive Director Andrew Friedrichs said the event “purports to be public facing and discriminatory at the same time” and compared it to advertising for a “Whites only” event.
“All Muslims — but only Muslims — may attend,” Friedrichs wrote. “An event at a city-owned pool that was publicly and indiscriminately advertised as ‘Whites only’ would surely violate the Constitution.”
Event organizer Dr. Aminah Knight later updated the online flyer to clarify that the DFW Eid Celebration is a “privately organized and privately funded event held through a standard rental of Epic Waters, just like many other private gatherings hosted at the park.”
“At its core, this event is about creating a space where individuals and families, particularly those who value modest dress and a modest environment, can come together and enjoy a recreational setting comfortably,” Knight wrote.
Knight added that anyone “of a different faith who wants to celebrate the Eid holiday with us and adhere to the modest dress code” is welcome to attend.
A screenshot of an online flyer for a 2025 “Muslims only” event at the Epic Indoor Waterpark in Grand Prairie, Texas. | Screenshot/Facebook
A Facebook post shared by Knight in May 2025 promoting last year’s event included a flyer calling it an “exclusive Muslim-only event” and stating that the taxpayer-funded facility was “closed to the public” for “Muslims only.”
It is unclear whether the City of Grand Prairie approved the flyer or its contents. The city did not respond to CP’s request for comment by Thursday afternoon.
While the 2026 event flyer listed Knight as the organizer, a video shared on social media by Muhammad Abdullah, listed as the director of Outreach & Youth at Al-Hedayah Academy in Fort Worth, claimed he organized the event.
In a video posted Tuesday, Abdullah blamed “Islamophobia” for the public response to the now-canceled event and said, “By the way, I’m organizing that with my wife.”
CP reached out to Al-Hedayah Academy, where Abdullah is pictured as a member of the mosque’s “spiritual team,” seeking clarification Thursday on whether the mosque was involved in organizing the event.
According to Knight, more than 600 people attended the event last year, and all “lovers of modest fashion and those who are curious about Eid and what modesty at a waterpark can look like” are welcome to attend.
Owned by the city of Grand Prairie near the Dallas and Tarrant County border, Epic Waters — which has no ties to the planned Muslim-centric development formerly known as “EPIC City” — is an 80,000-square-foot waterpark with a retractable roof and the longest indoor lazy river in North Texas, according to its website.
Epic Waters opened in 2017 after voters approved a 0.25% sales tax, according to city documents. The park is available for rent at a cost of $5,000 an hour, Dallas News reported.
I remember when penny candy went to nickel candy under Pres. Nixon, and applied what we learned in our school “Weekly Readers” to figure that out. Of course there were larger problems. A few years later, my dad lost his business due to general economic woe with high inflation, and I’m pretty sure everyone remembers how personal and smaller business econ went in the 80s. I don’t know why we have to repeat history, when certainly more than a few people can remember this stuff. But, here it is in a concise video. Sharing it would be awesome!
At first glance, the Yellow-breasted Chat seems to be a mishmash of many bird families: its larger size and stout bill resemble a Scarlet Tanager’s, while its skulking habits and complex vocalizations seem more like those of a thrasher or mockingbird. Taxonomically, this bird was considered an unusual wood warbler in the family Parulidae. However, in 2017, the American Ornithologists Union gave this bird its own family — Icteriidae — based on its unique physical and genetic features. It is considered to be related to the blackbirds and meadowlarks of the Western Hemisphere.
Among birders, the Yellow-breasted Chat is best-known for two features of its behavior: its habit of staying hidden at most times within the thickest vegetation available, and its loud, wild, weird song and flight display. In 1953, ornithologist Arthur Cleveland Bent described the Chat’s song as a “medley of strange sounds, musical and otherwise, catcalls, whistles, and various bird notes coming from points now here, now there in the bushes” — sounds which would “betray the presence of this furtive and elusive clown among birds.” The song is indeed a strange and wonderful mix of cackles, clucks, whistles, and hoots. Only males are known to sing, and they do so from deep inside the densest cover. A male chat may sometimes sound as if he’s laughing at the frustrated birders trying to locate him. (snip-MORE)
And thanks to MDavis for intro’ing this guy, who is great!
I’d run across this article linked somewhere earlier this past week. But, I couldn’t read it or post it, because it was behind a paywall. Well, thanks to Punctuated.Equilibrium over on MPS Friday night, here it is! Well, a goodly snip of it. Give ’em a click to read it all, because they lifted the paywall so that everyone who wants to know can read it.
During President Joe Biden’s term, the Department of Justice could say, at least, that it had investigated the president’s son. Republicans in Congress also conducted a yearslong investigation into the Hunter Biden business ties and how they might link back to the president. Here, though, we have nothing; every story I’m about to point to has not produced even a unified statement of concern from, say, a half dozen Republican senators worried about government corruption.
Remember, Hunter’s story was about drawing a $50,000/month salary while his dad was vice president and then allegedly trying to arrange some business ventures he might cut Joe Biden in on once he was out of office. Republicans’ yearslong investigation never turned up any hard evidence of the latter, though there was enough smoke I still think the story was plausible.
Today, we’re talking about the president’s children launching multi-billion dollar business ventures — several of them — while the president is in office, and then explicitly exchanging all manner of domestic policy victories, foreign policy concessions, and literal pardons in the construction of those deals. Trump himself has all but admitted this is happening. He told The New York Times that “nobody cared” when he tried to separate his family business from his administration during his first term, so he isn’t even trying now.
I have tracked these stories with one of my senior editors for the last year and a half. The list of things that have happened is so long and shocking when you see it all together that I’m not entirely sure how to present it. I’ve gone back and forth; maybe I should build a flow chart? What about a spreadsheet? Should this be a YouTube video, instead of a written piece? Will anyone actually read the entire thing? Can anyone actually process this level of self-dealing, corruption, and shadiness at once?
Ultimately, I decided that the best I can do is try to write all these instances down in an engaging way that might grab your attention and wake us all up from whatever stupor we’re in. So… here goes.
Let’s start with the cryptocurrency.
Perhaps the largest vehicle for Trump’s self-dealing has been his foray into cryptocurrency. This is a complicated space that I will try to make as straightforward and simple as possible.
In 2024, the Trump family launched a crypto company called World Liberty Financial. Trump is listed as a “co-founder emeritus.” By December of 2025, they had profited roughly $1 billion from proceeds while holding $3 billion in unsold cryptocurrency tokens, amassing a fortune larger than their entire real estate portfolio. At the same time the president was pushing his family’s new crypto venture, he was cutting crypto regulation, touting the potential of private digital currencies to help the U.S. economy, and promising to unleash the industry he and his family were simultaneously profiting from.
But the president wasn’t only directly making money in an industry he was deregulating; the Trumps benefitted through intermediaries, too. Last summer, World Liberty Financial bought a publicly listed firm and raised $750 million from investors to buy its own cryptocurrency, WLFI. The Wall Street Journal tepidly described this setup as an “unusually circular transaction with the same party as buyer and seller” that could net the Trump family an additional $500 million.
Essentially, the Trump family launched a cryptocurrency firm while deregulating the crypto industry, then bought a separate firm that it used to buy its own cryptocurrency while also raising three quarters of a billion dollars from investors to buy that same cryptocurrency.
Just days before he was inaugurated, Trump alsolaunched a personal “memecoin” called $TRUMP. Memecoins are cryptocurrencies made about internet jokes, pop culture moments, or viral trends. They have no underlying value or technological purpose; the value of the coin is driven entirely by social hype. Trump created hype for his memecoin by launching it months after being elected and just three days before being inaugurated. He promoted $TRUMP on social media and, while president, even held a dinner for the top 220 holders of the coin at one of his golf resorts in Virginia. He held another one at Mar-a-Lago this past weekend. The initial coin offering released 200 million tokens of its billion-token supply to the public on the first day. The price skyrocketed 300% overnight and hit an all-time high of $74.27 on January 19, right before Trump’s inauguration. $TRUMP has since cratered, losing 97% of its value (for context, if you had bought $1,000 at its peak, your $1,000 would now be worth about $30).
Trump, naturally, profited. The exact figures are hard to pin, but The Financial Times estimated that the scheme netted him personally about $350 million, while Trump’s holdings of the coin through a separate partnership could be worth billions more. It wasn’t just the president, either; First Lady Melania Trump launched her own memecoin, which also skyrocketed in value before a massive sell-off that she profited from (what people in the industry call a “rug pull”). Most of the people who bought and held the coin based on the hype the Trumps created ended up losing most of their money, but the coin’s creators got rich (or, in this case, richer).
This cryptocurrency foray hasn’t just been a vehicle for self-enrichment, but also a vehicle for quid pro quos. Perhaps the most obvious and overt involved Justin Sun, a crypto billionaire who was being investigated by the SEC for fraud. Sun, in the midst of his investigation, bought $75 million of WLFI — the World Liberty Financial coin — and then became an adviser at the company. Shortly after that investment, the SEC backed off its investigation and settled with him for $10 million, a small fraction of the expected penalties he was set to pay (on top of potential prison time). Of course, it’s possible that the SEC, an organization now openly being influenced by the president, just happened to back off its investigation in the weeks following Sun’s $75 million investment into Trump’s crypto firm.
It’s also possible that the two events are related.
The crypto story, though, hardly ended there. In late April, CBS reported that Sun was suing the Trump administration’s World Liberty Financial, alleging fraud. That’s right: Sun, whose initial case has since concluded, has now turned around and sued the Trump family, alleging that the president and his sons are illegally blocking him from selling his digital tokens that are worth as much as $1 billion. Sun also claims that World Liberty Financial tried to pressure him into investing in its stable coin, and that the company froze his tokens after he refused to commit more money to the business.
It’s hard to identify the villain.
Sun’s apparent quid pro quo to get out from under government oversight is just one example. Changpeng Zhao, the founder of Binance, was pardoned by President Trump shortly after Zhao helped boost WLFI’s prominence by allowing the currency to be traded on the crypto exchange Binance, which Zhao started. After the pardon, Zhao became one of the Trumps’ business partners, boosting the family’s crypto empire while skating serious charges that he allowed money to flow to terrorists, cyber criminals, and child abusers on his platform.
If that’s not enough, more shocking news broke this week. According to The Wall Street Journal, World Liberty Financial inadvertently partnered with two men the U.S. government had sanctioned a month before for helping run a transnational criminal syndicate that had stolen billions of dollars from Americans through online scams. To repeat: Last fall, the Trump administration announced criminal charges against a transnational criminal syndicate for stealing billions of dollars from Americans in online scams. A month later, two of the men it sanctioned partnered with the Trump family’s crypto company.
The evidence of crypto investments from foreign nationals operating as de facto bribes doesn’t end there. Consider the story of Sheikh Tahnoun bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the brother of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) president and one of the most powerful politicians in the Middle East (he’s served as the UAE’s national security advisor since 2016). He stewards an empire of wealth worth roughly $1.5 trillion, and a firm closely tied to him secretly signed a deal for a 49% stake in WLFI worth $500 million — including $187 million paid upfront to Trump family entities just days before Trump’s inauguration. Shortly after Trump took office, the administration undid a national security block that would have prevented the UAE from getting up to 500,000 advanced Nvidia AI chips.
Some right-wing writers, like National Review’s Andrew McCarthy, have been brave enough to take this story head-on — but many have ignored it.
Sometimes, the favors happen en masse. The crypto industry as a whole was a top donor to Trump’s 2025 inauguration fund, and the SEC then dropped or paused over a dozen cases against crypto firms, or simply handed them huge access to government-directed crypto entities. Several of those cases, like Sun’s, were tied directly to donations. Coinbase donated $1 million; its lawsuit was dropped. Ripple ($4.9 million) and Solana ($1 million) had their tokens added to the national Digital Asset Stockpile.
I want to pause here to remind people that we spent all four years of the Biden administration talking about Hunter Biden’s alleged $50,000 a month salary while working at an energy firm in Ukraine, and the possibility that he was setting up some business deals for his father after he left the vice presidency. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) introduced articles of impeachment alleging Biden “abused the power of the Office of the Vice President, enabling bribery and other high crimes and misdemeanors, by allowing his son to influence the domestic policy of a foreign nation and accept various benefits—including financial compensation—from foreign nationals in exchange for certain favors.”
Conversely, the final tally of investments from parties with conflicts of interest into crypto assets personally managed by the Trump family safely enters the range of billions of dollars — a scale of thousands of millions, in just one sector and in just over one year, while the president was actually in office.
Doral Trump statue sculptor Alan Cottrill says no other commission has been as chaotic.Golden statue photo by Orlando Ramirez/Getty Images; overlaid photo from Alan Cottrill. New Times photo collage.
Scottie's Playtime 