Trump Shows Photo of (Imaginary) Reflecting Pool Admirers (original) (raw)

Photo: Tom Williams/Roll Call/Getty Images

It’s a big day for Donald Trump. While construction crews will have to work around the clock to finish the “Arc de Trump” before the end of his term, and the White House ballroom still looks like a rubble pit, he’s actually completed one of his major Washington, D.C., renovation projects. After months of work, construction crews have finished repainting the basin of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, and it was refilled this week.

The president has been showing off the project all morning. First, he shared this fawning X post from Howard Lutnick to his Truth Social account:

Weirdly, while the Commerce secretary reported that “There were a thousand people, everywhere, taking pictures and just enjoying its beauty,” none of them are visible in the photo he posted.

Later on Wednesday morning, Trump bragged about the Reflecting Pool in the Oval Office, describing it as “taller than any building in the world” and “twice the height of the Empire State Building and much wider.”

This is also a tad confusing, since the pool is, obviously, flat. But for weeks Trump has been brandishing an apples-to-oranges infographic showing that if you laid various skyscrapers on the ground, they’d be shorter than the Reflecting Pool. (Trump has also called the D.C. monument “the longest pool anywhere in the world,” though at 2,030 feet it’s far shorter than the 5,479-foot Grand Canal at the Palace of Versailles.)

Photo: Samuel Corum/Sipa/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Maybe we should review some “before and after” photos from an impartial source, like Getty Images. Here’s an overhead view of the Reflecting Pool from June 19, 2025:

Here’s the nearly filled pool on June 8, 2026:

Photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images

Here’s a side view from a year ago, on June 12, 2025:

Photo: Photo by Kevin Carter/Getty Images

And a shot of the same spot yesterday:

Photo: Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images

Many feared the new paint color on the basin, which Trump described as “American flag blue,” would look garish or ruin the pool’s mirrorlike surface. That doesn’t appear to be the case. It’s actually hard to tell if the $14.8 million renovation really accomplished anything. But maybe it’s just hard to capture the change in photos?

Or, maybe it just isn’t drastically different. NPR visited the site on Friday and most onlookers said it looked the same:

As the temperature neared 90 degrees, tourists, cyclists and joggers paused at the top of the nearby steps to snap photos and observe the process. Many welcomed the return of the water — and the ducks that play in it — but said they couldn’t immediately tell a difference in the color.

“The more water it fills, the more similar it looks [to before],” said Luisa Córdoba, a D.C. resident and avid runner who says she’s been coming to check on the pool every day since work started. “I’m just happy it’s not that bright blue that we saw the first days, which was so alarming … if it stays like this, it’s fine.”

Apparently only Howard Lutnick got the memo about the emperor’s new Reflecting Pool.

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