Trump Thanks Himself In Screed On His DC Building Projects

The Associated Press

President Donald Trump thanked himself outright Saturday in a Truth Social screed about his building projects, while declaring “THE BEST IS YET TO COME.”

Trump has been doing victory laps over the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, which was sealed with a substance in the color “American flag blue” and refilled with water this week. Trump’s post included a photo of Interior Secretary Doug Burgum inspecting the sealant before the water flowed.

“All work is complete! Great American Patriots, primarily from the Great State of Oklahoma, plus Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior, inspecting the very complex, but powerful, Dark Blue surface of the Reflecting Pool, prior to submerging it in CLEAN, BEAUTIFUL WATER. It was originally opened in 1922, but never functioned properly — now it does!” Trump wrote.

Trump then thanked himself for a job well done, and listed off his other building projects.

“Thank you President Trump, thank you Department of the Interior — AND THE BEST IS YET TO COME with The Trump Promenade at The Lincoln Memorial, and The Triumphal Arch, which will be, along with the White House Ballroom, when completed, the Greatest Structure in Washington,” he wrote.

During a meeting with Wisconsin farmers on Friday, Trump also bragged about the reflecting pool project, which was handed over as a no-bid contract to a Virginia firm that later raised the price from $1.8 million to $13.1 million. Trump still claimed he was getting a deal.

“So it would have cost $400 million…to fix. It would have taken four years,” Trump said, continuing:

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.

The New York Times published a report at the end of May explaining how the sealant alone won’t stop the leaks that have plagued the pool since it was built in the 1920s.

According to the Times, the company, Atlantic Industrial Coatings, “was contracted to reseal the expansion joints and add blue-tinted coating to the pool — not to fix the leaky pipes connecting the pool to a treatment plant that filters and purifies the water.”

Trump has said that the blue coating will last for 40 or 50 years and “there’ll be no leaks, there’ll be no anything,” but the Times report refuted that statement.

Unless the underlying problem with the pipes is fixed, experts told the Times that “the algae could come back.”

“If that happens, the pool’s newly waterproofed blue floor could again be invisible under a layer of green murk,” the report said.

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