Trump Hosts Proud Workers Behind Refurbished Reflecting Pool in the Oval Office
The Lincoln Memorial basin is one of the president's many capital-beautification projects.
It’s always nice when the boss notices your work, and the men who helped refurbish the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool got the ultimate attaboy when President Trump hosted them Tuesday night in the Oval Office.
White House communications adviser Margo Martin posted a video showing the president with “the hardworking men,” each of whom, she said, “received a signed hat and a presidential challenge coin.”
With huge smiles on their faces — and an American-themed flag shirt on one worker — the men took turns walking up to the president’s desk to have him autograph their hats. One asked Mr. Trump to sign a University of Oklahoma baseball cap as well; the president obliged, asking about the team.
Repairing the pool, which is 2,028 feet long and 167 feet wide, was a priority for the president, who has unleashed a spate of restoration projects in the capital. He demolished the White House’s East Wing to make way for a new, much larger ballroom, a project that has stoked controversy and lawsuits.
The president also backed the restoration of cascading fountains in Meridian Hill Park, which had been in bad repair for decades. And a sculpture outside Union Station honoring Christopher Columbus — once covered in pro-Hamas graffiti — has been cleaned with its fountains restored.
These projects — and the reflecting-pool renovation — have sparked criticism from Democrats in Congress and lawsuits over the pool, the ballroom, and a proposed “triumphal arch” on the roadway towards Arlington National Cemetery. But Mr. Trump is determined to beautify the city, particularly during the nation’s 250th anniversary year.
“For years, the nation’s capital was allowed to decay — marred by crime, graffiti, and crumbling infrastructure — amid a bureaucratic acceptance of decline as inevitable,” The White House said last month, declaring Mr. Trump “rejected that surrender from Day One.”
An interest in public-works beautification is nothing new for Mr. Trump, a real-estate magnate whose 1986 restoration of a Central Park ice rink made him a New York celebrity. That project, to reopen the Wollman Rink, had been mired in the city’s bureaucracy since its 1980 closure over safety concerns.
City officials working for then-Mayor Ed Koch had promised a five-year completion for the dilapidated rink. Mr. Trump vowed in June 1986 to have the rink open by Christmas; the project was completed in three-and-a-half months, with a November 1 reopening.
Mayor Bill de Blasio announced he was severing the city’s contracts, including the ice-rink operation, with the Trump Organization in January 2021, after protesters stormed the Capitol Building.
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