Trump Riffs For 7 Solid Minutes on Pools, Fountains, Grass, And ‘The Washington — That Beautiful Spire’ in New Reno Weave

President Donald Trump went on a lengthy riff about the renovations he’s undertaken, including the area between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington “you know, that beautiful spire!”

In addition to his now-billion-dollar ballroom, the Reflecting Pool has become a consistent focus of the president, as have other expensive renovations to monuments and fountains around the District of Columbia.

Trump traveled to Wisconsin for an event that was dubbed a “Roundtable on American Agriculture,” but which featured many of the elements associated with Trump rallies.

One such element was a lengthy “weave” on the renovation spree he’s been focused on:

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: And we’re just off a very big success in Washington, D.C. We had — it doesn’t sound like much, but Washington, D.C., was not properly managed or kept. We had 22 fountains. None of them worked for the last 50 years. None of them. They were graffiti-strewn.

I did it the inexpensive way. Why should we have a screen? Everybody here has good vision. I want to show you something. Look at this. I’m going to show you the cheap way, okay? We don’t want to bring screens. It costs too much money. Look at that. That’s before and after. Look at that. Look at that. Can anybody see that? That’s before. That’s our nation’s capital. That’s what it — look at this graffiti all over it, filthy, disgusting stone. The stone was all horrible. And look over there. That’s before and after.

Then we had the reflecting pond, 2,500 feet massive, longer than a building. We have — we have a stat here that’s sort of great. Can you guys see this okay? Because I’m too cheap to put up, like, a projector. Look. So that’s the pond, if we’re standing up. Here’s your Sears Tower, Empire State Building, World Trade Center. Look. It’s double and triple the size in terms of area.

So it would have cost $400 million, Ron, to fix. It would have taken four years. And they were getting ready. Doug Burgum has done an amazing job. And I said, you know, rather than doing that, they were going to put stone down, big stone, granite, wonderful. But it all leaks because you have joints. So being a very good builder, I said, you know what? I built a lot of swimming pools, many, many swimming pools. Every time I do a development, I do swimming pools. I know more about swimming pools.

I said, why can’t we put the wonderful material, which is thick, pasty, beautiful, like rubber, but industrial strength, why can’t we use it? And let’s pick the color blue from the American flag, which is what we did. And that is the most beautiful thing that you’ve ever seen. And look at that. I mean, look at that. It just opened yesterday. We just opened it. So there was going to take four years, 400 million. It took really about a month.

OK, can you imagine Washington between Lincoln? Think of Washington, D.C. Between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington, just think about this, you know that beautiful spire in honor of the great George Washington and the beautiful Lincoln Memorial. So between there, thousands of feet long, it was built in 1922. And to be honest, it never really worked. It leaked like a sieve because it was stone and concrete.

So I took over the project. Now Barack Hussein Obama, have you heard of him? Barack Hussein, Barack Hussein Obama spent and Joe Biden, Sleepy Joe. They spent a total of about $150 million trying to fix it. They never got it opened. It never worked. It was terrible. Disgusting, was garbage ridden.

And I said, my pool guy, I said, take a look at it. And he said, well, sir, we can do it. We’ll get industrial strength. And I use some guys, not him. I use some guys, but he gave me some good ideas because he’s a pro. You know, they got very upset when I sent my pool person. I said, who else am I going to send? So I sent him over and we sprayed it and put down beautiful, like a pool coating. It’ll last maybe 50 to 100 years.

So here’s the thing, 400 million versus like 10 million, four years, four years versus a month. Can you imagine? Can you imagine? And the difference is, look, here’s the Lincoln Memorial. You have the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial. Look at that. Beautiful. Look at how that reflects. It’s like a mirror. Oh, beautiful, clean water. They had like garbage. Barack Obama wanted to save money. So he took the water out of the Potomac. That didn’t work out too well. A lot of things were coming out of that river into this one. It wasn’t good.

So we just think of it. So like a month of this work, we actually added to it. We did the sidewalks because once we did this, we had to do the rest because it looks so good. But think of it, 400 million versus like 10 million bucks for a better job, four years versus a month for a better job. We have many things like that. I talk about that all the time. We do a lot of things like that. So we’re very proud of Washington.

We had 22 fountains that didn’t work. All of the fountains, not one fountain in Washington worked out of the 22 fountains. They’re all looking beautiful, just like the one I showed you. And now they’re clean. They’re beautiful. There’s no graffiti. Washington, D.C. is a safe city. It was a very unsafe city a year and a half ago. And it was a very unsafe city. Your child would go to see the Jefferson Memorial or the Washington or the Lincoln or any of them and would oftentimes not come back. It was a horrible place. It was horrible.

What was happening? And we put our great military in there and we did a job. We removed 5,000 people that were career criminals, 2 percent of the people. Think of this. Two percent of the people. Did you know this, Ron? Create 91 percent of the crime. And I love that statistic because you can get rid of 2 percent. We took them out. We brought them back to where they came from. They came in. Many of them came in through Sleepy Joe’s open border policy, one of the craziest policies I’ve ever heard. So we saved a lot of money.

And you go to Washington, D.C., new grass. People say they don’t even recognize that we did that all in a little bit more than a year. And even I said it’s amazing. But maybe the biggest thing is we don’t have — it’s considered now a very, very safe city. And you can go there and you’re going to be 100 percent perfect.

We had the restaurants were all closing and now they’re opening up. They don’t have enough restaurants anymore. It’s like it’s a beautiful thing to see.

Watch above via White House Press Pool.

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