President Donald Trump on Thursday shifted focus amid an Oval Office full of White House officials and pharmaceutical executives — and with the U.S. war in Iran entering its eighth week — for an extended ramble about hiring his hotel company’s preferred swimming pool builder to renovate the historic reflecting pool on the National Mall.
The president had been listening to executives from Regeneron — the company behind the Covid-19 treatment that saved his life when he contracted the virus in October 2020 — when he segued from talk about returning semiconductor manufacturing to the U.S. to the previously unannounced renovations he ordered up at the White House and around Washington.
“The other thing that we’re doing that’s taking place right now is, the Lincoln Memorial has a beautiful reflecting pond, or lake. He called it a pool, lake and pond. Everything is different, but the word reflecting is a good term,” Trump said.
He complained that the 2,030-foor by 167-foot pool, which was built in 1922 between the Lincoln Memorial and Washington Monument, “never looked great” because the stone on the bottom of the pool was “not really meant to be a stone that’s underwater for that much of a period of time.” Trump went on about how a “friend” from Germany had similarly knocked the landmark’s condition as “filthy, disgusting,” and “not representative of the country” while also claiming that the Biden administration had solicited bids to renovate the pool that had come in at $301 million and would take as many as “three and a half years.”
So, the president told reporters, he decided to employ a contractor he’d used to build pools at his Trump hotels and residential towers.
“As a developer, I’ve probably built more than 100 swimming pools, different buildings. I built, and I have some really good pool builders … but over the years, I’ve had three or four really good ones,” he said.
“I took the best of the three. I had all three go, but I ended up taking the best. And I said, when you take a look at this, it’s 2,200 feet long.”
Trump then recounted how he’d told Interior Secretary Doug Burgum that he’d asked his “pool guy” to look at the Reflecting Pool project and had been told the renovation could be done in a matter of weeks for far less than what had been bid previously.
“I said, I have an idea. I’m going to send my contractor over and take a look. He looked at it … he said it’s really decaying and it’s a terrible condition, but if you would, I’d like to work two weeks on cleaning it up … and he said ‘it’d take me two weeks,’” he said.
“Our job will take one week. It will cost about a million and a half dollars.”
Trump then told reporters the reflecting pool project “is being done now” as he showed off photos of the ongoing work.
The historic water feature has had to undergo maintenance and be drained numerous times over the years to clean algae from the pool’s interior, to repair damage from construction on nearby memorial projects, and to control outbreaks of parasites that have killed ducks and ducklings who have swam in the pool in recent years.
The president’s rambling remarks on his latest renovation project comes as Iran and the United States continue to face off over control of the Strait of Hormuz.
The key maritime chokepoint remains closed to commercial traffic due to dueling blockades by both countries.
Earlier this week, Trump elected to extend a ceasefire that had been set to expire even in the absence of fresh negotiations between the two sides, citing a lack of cohesion in Iran’s government after U.S. and Israeli airstrikes killed most of the country’s senior leadership in the early days of the war last month.
Trump initially promised that the campaign against Iran would only take four to six weeks — a time frame that has long passed — and he became combative when pressed by reporters on how long he’d be willing to continue the war he started before accepting some sort of deal with Tehran.
“Don’t rush me … so we’re in Vietnam, like for 18 years. We were in Iraq for many, many years … . I’ve been doing this for six weeks, and we’re, their military is totally defeated,” he said.
He added that he could not answer the question about a timeline in part because “they have all new leadership” who he claimed are “fighting like cats and dogs.”
“This is all about a nuclear weapon. They cannot have the nuclear bomb, and they’re not going to have the nuclear bomb. So we’ve taken out their military. We’ve hit about 75% of our targets. We stopped a little early because they wanted to have some peace, and we have a blockade that’s 100% effective, and they’re getting no business. And as you know, they’re not doing well economically. Financially, they’re not doing any business because of the blockade,” he said.
“They want to make a deal. We have been speaking to them, but they don’t even know who’s leading the country. They’re in turmoil. They’re in turmoil. So we thought we’d give them a little chance to get some of their turmoil resolved.”
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