Trump renovating ‘filthy’ Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool with new ‘American Flag Blue’ paint job – One America News Network

OAN Staff Katherine Mosack
8:37 AM – Friday, April 24, 2026

President Donald Trump said his next construction project is a patriotic restoration of the bottom of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.

The president made the announcement on Thursday in a video message on social media. Speaking to reporters on the same day, he explained that the over 100-year-old reflecting pool was in “terrible” condition due to the materials originally used to construct it.

“I thought I’d bring up a subject of interest. I do a lot of this as president and try and save money. And one was the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, which everybody knows. That’s where Martin Luther King [Jr.] made his great speech,” Trump said in his message.

He noted that the memorial was first built in 1922. The shallow pool is about 2,030 feet long and 167 feet wide, making it longer in length than the height of any skyscraper in the country, as the tallest building in the U.S. is the 1,776-foot-tall One World Trade Center in New York City.

The pool was “built out of granite and various stones on the bottom,” Trump said. “And it never looked great because that’s not really meant to be a stone that’s underwater for that much of a period of time.”

Trump recalled that a friend from Germany saw the reflecting pool while on a trip to visit him in Washington, D.C., and he commented that it was “filthy dirty.”

“The water is disgusting looking,” the friend said, according to Trump. “It’s not representative of the country.”

 

Trump said that he visited the pool himself, with “Secret Service in tow,” and agreed that the pool needed a renovation.

“It was leaking like a sieve,” he remarked. “You couldn’t keep water, you couldn’t keep anything.”

The project had encountered various obstacles, however. The Biden administration had also looked into fixing up the symbolic construction, but never accomplished anything from the bids.

The cost for renovation, which included removing thousands of feet of granite, was quoted at $301 million, according to Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum, who inspected the pool alongside the president. The project was also estimated to take three to three-and-a-half years to complete.

“I said, ‘No, there’s a better way of doing it,’” Trump recounted in his video message. “I said, ‘What we’re going to do is I’m going to call all three of these people that have worked for me in the past doing swimming pools’ … and I said, ‘Give me a good price.’”

Trump noted that throughout his flourishing real estate development career, he “probably built more than 100 swimming pools.” His connections in the swimming pool industry quoted $1.5 million to $2 million to repair the pool using a different method than what previous administrations considered.

President Trump explained that instead of spending years replacing the original stones, his team spent two weeks scrubbing and grouting the stones to prepare them for an “industrial-grade swimming pool topping” to create a seal and prevent further leaks.

Asked what color the bottom of the pool should be, Trump first suggested turquoise, “like in the Bahamas.” Upon learning that “American Flag Blue” was an option, however, he quickly changed his mind.

“The difference is this is much better,” Trump said, comparing the estimated cost and timeframe to his administration’s plan. “This will last 30, 40, 50 years, and if it didn’t, you’d do it again quickly, if you want.”

He praised the machine that will lay the material at the bottom of the pool, as well as the “robots” that will be able to routinely clean the pool, especially leading up to this year’s Semiquincentennial celebration on July 4^th, in which the United States will celebrate its 250^th birthday.

“You’ll have it for July 4^th — long before July 4^th,” Trump said.