The project has Donald Trump obsessed. Critics cry corruption and bad taste. Supporters praise the president for cleaning up America.
The ongoing project to refurbish the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in front of the Washington Monument has transformed a symbol of national unity into yet another focus for discord in Trump’s America.
Trump has ordered the long basin, designed to capture reflections of the towering Washington obelisk on the Mall, to be drained and painted in what he calls “American flag blue.”
Currently the job is only half done, turning the popular tourist attraction into a fenced-off work site.
The 79-year-old Republican president is taking extraordinary interest in the project — almost as much as in the enormous ballroom he has ordered built on the site of the White House East Wing, which he abruptly tore down after taking power last year.
For opponents, the pool mirrors much of what is wrong in the administration.
They point to the rising cost and reported links between Trump and the contractor. And they question the use of blue paint at an iconic landmark, perhaps most famous as the setting for civil rights leader Martin Luther King’s 1963 “I have a dream” speech.
Coming on top of the ballroom, Trump putting his name on the side of the Kennedy arts center, and plans for building a giant triumphal arch, it has critics fuming.
Trump’s “putting his fingers in everything that he possibly can,” Sammy, a young woman from Richmond, Virginia, said Wednesday, declining to give her last name.
“He’s so narcissistic,” she said. “The city is going to bear the scars of this lunatic for a really long time.”
Trump the builder
Trump says it’s high time to fix up the pool.
“It was filthy, dirty and it leaked like a sieve for many years,” he said in a White House video.
Fans say they trust his experience as a real estate developer — an image he has cultivated to leverage support for his call to remake not just public buildings, but the nation’s economy and politics.
“He knows what he’s doing with all his buildings,” said Elizabeth Miller from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, while visiting the Lincoln Memorial. “He makes America proud by cleaning everything up.”
Trump backers also point out that the Reflecting Pool long had maintenance issues.
Then president Barack Obama’s administration spent $34 million trying to fix it up.
Trump said he was rejecting a $300-million, three-year project to replace the stone in the basin, and would instead turn to a swimming pool contractor he knew who could resurfacing the place and coating it blue. This, he said, would cost a mere $1.5 million or so.
For Russ, who was visiting from Arizona and likewise did not want to give his last name, that seems like a deal.
“If it’s cheaper, quicker and just as effective, why should we waste tax money? I don’t see any downside to it,” Russ said.
Murky water, murky finances
But according to reporting in The New York Times, that supposedly bargain price tag is already ballooning to $13 million.
The Times also reported that the government gave a no-bid contract for the job to a construction company in Virginia that had done previous work for Trump, bypassing the requirements to seek competing bids.
According to the report, the government cited urgency to get the job done by July 4th, marking America’s 250th birthday.
Trump has since said he doesn’t know the contractor and has not used the company before.
But it troubles Margaret Herro, a tourist from Wisconsin.
“I understood we had some sort of a process to clean up our national monuments, and I don’t feel like he went through that process,” she said. “It’s a bit of a dictator approach.”
– What next? –
The non-profit group Cultural Landscape Foundation has sued to stop the makeover, calling the blue paint job “desecration.”
That has not stopped work.
But beyond the political and symbolic controversies, there are already doubts over whether the Reflecting Pool will be fixed.
“It’s not the right solution,” said an engineer visiting from Maryland who only gave his name as Obe. “They needed to fix the drainage and not just paint it blue to make it look bright.”
Joining tourists at the Lincoln Memorial on Wednesday, Gregory Scott from Atlanta echoed a question on the lips of supporters and opponents of Trump alike.
“What is he going to do next?”
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