President Donald Trump on Thursday touted plans to coat the Lincoln Memorial’s reflecting pool in a shade of “Stars and Stripes Blue.” This is one of the president’s latest construction efforts to renovate government buildings and monuments in Washington, D.C.
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President Trump said he was inspired to oversee the renovation work after a friend visiting from Germany pointed out the building’s deterioration.
“He said, ‘It’s dirty, it’s dirty. The water is ugly. It’s not representative of our country,'” Trump recalled Thursday at a White House event on drug prices.
Shortly before an event with reporters at the White House, President Trump posted a video on Truth Social talking about renovating the more than 2,000-foot-long pool.
“It’s in such bad shape that there’s no water in it right now. It’s filthy, it’s dirty, and it’s been leaking like a sieve for years,” Trump said in the video. “So I actually went and went with the Secret Service and a group of people and looked at it and saw it.”
The president said there were originally plans to remove the granite in the pool and replace it with stone, but the process would cost $300 million and take more than three years to complete.
Instead, President Trump said he contacted his private contractor to clean the stone and coat it in a new color he described as “Stars and Stripes Blue.”
“We scraped the existing granite surface that had been there since 1922. We then grouted and repaired all the granite,” Trump said in the video. “It took about two weeks, and now we have a nice clean surface and we’re putting an industrial-grade pool topping on top.”
President Trump said the project is expected to cost between $1.5 million and $2 million and will be completed “well before the Fourth of July,” when the nation’s 250th anniversary celebrations take place.
“In just a few weeks, there will be the most beautiful reflecting pool you’ve ever seen between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial,” Trump said at the White House.
President Trump has promised in the past to completely renovate the pool. In a post on Truth Social last month, the president said he and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum were “working to repair the absolutely filthy reflecting pool between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument.”
The pool, the setting for historic events such as Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, underwent its last major renovation in 2012 in a $34 million, nearly two-year project.
President Trump’s effort to renovate the reflecting pool parallels a number of other construction projects he has led across Washington, D.C., including a $400 million plan to build a ballroom and military bunker in the East Wing of the White House and a major renovation of the Kennedy Center.
