In the days after America's 250th birthday celebration at the National Mall in Washington, D.C., on July 4, 2026, social media users shared a collection of photos purportedly showing trash bags and debris scattered around and within the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.
The pictures spread on Facebook (screenshotted) and Instagram. Tabloid newspapers like The Mirror also published some of the photographs alongside criticism of U.S. President Donald Trump's massive Fourth of July fireworks show.
(Laura Thompson/@wawawomp on Instagram)
These photos legitimately reflect what the area around the pool looked like after the July Fourth event. A professional freelance photographer, Laura Thompson, took many of the pictures that spread online and posted them under her Instagram handle, @wawawomp.
Thompson shared the original and edited image files with Snopes, which indicated via the file name, NEF, that she took the pictures on a Nikon camera. She also shared a screenshot of metadata for a couple of the photos, allowing us to confirm their time, date and other details.
While metadata can be manipulated, other people took similar videos of the reflecting pool and workers in bright yellow cleaning the landmark from different angles, lending additional credibility to the authenticity of Thompson's pictures. Furthermore, Thompson is a reputable photojournalist whose work has previously appeared in The New York Times and other credible publications.
As such, we have rated this claim as true.
The Mirror's story about the reflecting pool photographs listed "Laura Thompson/Shutterstock" as a source. A search on Shutterstock, a photo database, for keywords returned the pictures Thompson captured.
According to the metadata, the picture of the trash bags, specifically, was taken at 5:33 p.m on July 5, 2026. Thompson noted that her camera has not yet been adjusted to Daylight Savings Time, meaning the picture was actually taken at 6:33 p.m.
(Laura Thompson)
Thompson also shared a photograph (below) of the reflecting pool taken on July 6, indicating that the National Park Service had not managed to entirely clean up the area by that point in time.
(Laura Thompson)
Snopes contacted the NPS for comment on the cleanup process. We await a response.
Additional popular pictures of the reflecting pool circulating online appeared to originate as screenshots from a video that Amanda Moore — a freelance journalist who has previously written for progressive publications like Mother Jones and The Nation — posted on X.
Following the publication of this story, Moore said via email that she filmed the footage she posted on X and that she believed some of the posts circulating online were, in fact, screenshots from her video. Moore shared a screenshot of metadata that indicated the clip was recorded on an iPhone at 3:05 p.m. on July 5.
For more on the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, see our collection of rumors about the landmark.