TRANSCRIPT: President Trump Records Vlog Titled, "Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool," 4.23.26
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President Trump: 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 made his great speech, and where others have likewise made great speeches and great events held there.
It's very famous. It was built in 1922, and it's more than 2000 feet long. It's 167 feet wide. It's very big. That's like taller than any skyscraper, 2000 feet. And here's a picture of it. You probably recognize it. 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.
So I actually went over, went with Secret Service and a group of people and I took a look at it. One of the people with me was Doug Burgum, our great secretary of the interior. This comes under his purview. And he said, yes, we've had a lot of problems with it. It's not working. It hasn't worked for many years and it's always filthy, dirty.
And I said, well, we're going to solve the problem. And they had bids to fix it. They were going to take the stone out, which was granite, very expensive, very thick, and replace it with stone and it was going to cost $300 million. And it was going to take maybe more than three years. And I said, no, there's a better way of doing it. 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.
That's all they can do, is a swimming pool. And I said, give me a good price. We can do it for maybe a $1.5 million to $2 million, as opposed to $300 million. We scrubbed the surface of the existing granite that's been there since 1922. We then grouted all of the granite, fixed it up, took about two weeks, and now we have a nice, clean surface on which we're putting an industrial-grade swimming pool topping.
And they said, what color would you like, sir? It's called American Flag Blue. I said, that's the color I want. I want American flag blue. It'll last for 40 or 50 years. There'll be no leaks. There'll be no anything. It'll look gorgeous, beautiful. So it's a story on business. And here's the difference, because somebody said, well, sir, but, one, wouldn't it be a better job?
I said, no, no, this is a much better job for much less money. It will look far more beautiful, more beautiful than it did in 1922 when they built it, much more beautiful. So we build it in much less time for much less money, but I don't mean much less. I mean numbers that nobody can even believe. So it's $1.5 million versus $300 million. It's two weeks versus more than three years. And that's just the way it is. Thank you for your attention to this matter.