Trump Says Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool Renovation Will Cost Up to $2 Million
The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, one of Washington’s most recognizable civic spaces, is in the middle of a renovation that President Donald Trump says will be completed in two weeks and cost between $1.5 million and $2 million. Trump said the work began two weeks ago with crews scrubbing the granite clean, and that the project will give the 2,000-foot-long pool a new blue finish he described as “American flag blue.”
Trump announced the project during an Oval Office event on healthcare on April 23, saying a contractor he knows — whom he called “unbelievable at doing swimming pools” — is overseeing the work. He said he had consulted three contractors and asked for “a good price,” after rejecting an earlier turquoise idea that he said would have made the pool look like the Bahamas.
The president also claimed the Biden administration had previously pursued a renovation that came in at $300 million and would have taken three years. By contrast, Trump said his version would last 40 or 50 years.
The reflecting pool carries deep historical weight beyond its architecture. It was designed by Henry Bacon as an outgrowth of the McMillan Plan, the early 20th-century blueprint that reshaped Washington, D.C. It also forms part of the setting where Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech during the 1963 March on Washington.
The pool was last renovated in the early 2010s by the National Park Service at a cost of roughly $30 million. The new project arrives amid a broader wave of construction and redesign efforts Trump has pushed since returning to the White House, including work in the Rose Garden, the demolition of the East Wing for a planned ballroom, and a proposed 250-foot Triumphal Arch.
