Against a tense backdrop of a faltering ceasefire with Iran and mounting political peril for his Republican Party over the conflict’s mounting costs, former President Donald Trump used a high-profile Oval Office gathering with press corps this Wednesday to shift focus to a decidedly domestic topic: the ongoing renovation of the iconic Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.
This public appearance marked Trump’s first in several days, and the 79-year-old ex-real estate developer opened the executive order signing ceremony not with discussion of the escalating Middle East crisis, but with a deep dive into the decades-long problems plaguing the 102-year-old reflecting pool, one of Washington D.C.’s most visited tourist landmarks that is currently closed to the public for the makeover.
“It was opened in 1922 and it always leaked,” Trump told assembled reporters, leaning into his background in property development as he spoke with unusual energy about the construction project. He highlighted what he called a “very special material” engineered for the refurbishment, noting the pool is on track to welcome visitors again ahead of the upcoming July 4 holiday — a date that also doubles as the 250th anniversary of American independence.
The project has already drawn bipartisan scrutiny for its inflated price tag and questions surrounding the competitive bidding process that awarded the construction contract. In a striking display of showmanship, Trump brought out a custom-made graphic titled “Our Pool is Bigger than Skyscrapers”, on which he compared the 2,029-foot linear length of the reflecting pool to the vertical heights of three of the nation’s most famous skyscrapers, including New York City’s legendary Empire State Building.
The conversation soon turned to the site’s place in American civil rights history: the reflecting pool sits on the National Mall, where Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his landmark 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech to hundreds of thousands of civil rights supporters. In an unprompted comparison, Trump drew a parallel between King’s historic crowd and the rally he held on the same stretch of the Mall on January 6, 2021, shortly before his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
“That’s where Martin Luther King made his great speech. The million people, I had the same amount of people,” Trump claimed, adding “You put the picture side by side, which we have, and they said I had 25,000 (people), he had a million… my crowd was tighter.” Independent fact-checkers have long pushed back on these claims: the National Constitution Center estimates King’s 1963 gathering drew roughly 250,000 attendees, while no official credible crowd estimate exists for the January 6 rally. This is not the first time Trump has faced backlash for inflating attendance numbers; he famously claimed his 2017 inauguration drew a larger crowd than Barack Obama’s 2009 inauguration, despite clear photographic and statistical evidence to the contrary.
After an extended tangent on the reflecting pool project that lasted far longer than his opening remarks on the scheduled policy topics, Trump moved forward with signing two executive orders focused on U.S. customs policy and new protections for federal civil servants. Only when pressed by reporters did he address the ongoing conflict with Iran, telling reporters that he expected potential breakthroughs in negotiations “over the weekend” but offering no further details on the framework for any potential diplomatic deal.