President Donald Trump said Thursday that he enlisted swimming pool experts that he’d worked with before to repair the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool, in a video posted to Truth Social, the president’s online media company.
Sitting in the Oval Office and speaking directly to the camera, Trump said the pool — which was built in 1922 and served as the foreground for Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous “I Have A Dream” speech — was in “terrible shape,” but repairs would be costly.
“It was filthy dirty, and it leaked like a sieve for many years,“ he said, describing a visit he took to the pool recently with Interior Secretary Doug Burgum. “I said, ‘Well, we’re gonna solve the problem.'”
Trump, a former real estate developer, is attempting to leave an architectural legacy on the nation’s capitol. That has included a proposed 250-foot triumphal arch along the Potomac River and a massive ballroom on the White House grounds, where last year the president ordered the demolition of the historic East Wing.
