President Donald Trump touted plans Thursday to coat the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in an “American flag blue” hue, one of the president’s latest construction efforts to refashion government buildings and monuments in Washington, D.C.
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Trump said he was inspired to oversee renovations after a friend visited from Germany and noted its decay.
“He said, ‘it’s filthy, dirty. The water is disgusting looking. It’s not representative of the country,'” Trump recalled during a White House event Thursday on drug prices.
Trump posted a video speaking about the renovation of the over 2,000-foot-long pool on Truth Social, shortly before his White House event with reporters.
“Right now, it’s got no water in it because it was in terrible shape. It was filthy, dirty, and it leaked like a sieve for many years,” Trump said in the video. “So I actually went over, went with Secret Service and a group of people, and I took, took a look at it.”
The president said there were initial plans to remove the granite in the pool and replace the stone, but that process would have cost $300 million and taken more than three years to complete.
Instead, Trump said he contacted his own private contractors to clean the stone and then coat it in a new color, which he described as “American flag blue.”
“We scrubbed the surface of the existing granite that’s been there since 1922. We then grouted all of the granite, fixed it up,” Trump said in the video. “It took about two weeks, and now we have a nice, clean surface on which we’re putting an industrial grade swimming pool topping.”
Trump said the project is expected to cost between $1.5 and 2 million dollars and will be completed “long before July 4” for the country’s 250th celebration.
“In another couple of weeks, we’re going to have the most beautiful reflective pool between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial that you’ve ever seen,” Trump said at the White House.
Trump has pledged to overhaul the pool in the past. The president said in a post on Truth Social last month that he and Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum were “working on fixing the absolutely filthy Reflecting Pool between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument.”
The pool, the site of historical events such as Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a dream” speech, had its last major renovation in 2012 in a $34 million project that lasted almost two years.
Trump’s efforts to revamp the reflecting pool come alongside a number of other construction projects spearheaded by the president across Washington, D.C., including his plans to build a $400 million ballroom and military bunker in the East Wing of the White House and a major renovation of Kennedy Center.
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