The Reflecting Pool Chaos Really Isn't Funny

The reflecting pool was a corruption story before it was an arrest story. Watch how the wire wrote it down.

David Hearn is 67 years old. On Friday, he was somewhere in the middle of a long bike ride, when he stopped at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool to look at the thing everybody’s been looking at. The new blue paint on the bottom, peeling up and floating to the surface. Hearn knows materials (he’s a former Olympic canoeist who used to run a company that made boat-building supplies), so he reached in and touched a loose piece that was still attached. A park worker told him to stop. He stopped. Then the National Guard and the U.S. Park Police put him in handcuffs and held him for about five hours. He says he never got a phone call. He says nobody read him his rights. And he’s been charged with destroying government property, all because he touched a piece of paint that was already falling off on its own.

A member of the National Guard patrols the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool on June 22, 2026. (Photo by Kent Nishimura / AFP via Getty Images)