When U.S. President Donald Trump said in April that he was going to transform the Lincoln Memorial‘s reflecting pool by painting the surface in an “American flag blue,” the 2,000-foot-long structure lay empty and under construction.
At the time, he referred to the historically symbolic monument, where Martin Luther King Jr. gave his iconic 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech, as “filthy dirty” and said it “leaked like a sieve.” A month on and $14 million later, the glistening water feature has been restored.
The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool after being painted blue in Washington, D.C., on June 11, 2026. A Washington federal judge wrestled with how reversible U.S. President Donald Trump’s efforts to change the colour of the pool would be in the latest lawsuit targeting Trump’s moves to renovate some of Washington’s historic landmarks.
Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images
The president initially priced the project at $2 million and estimated it would be completed within a matter of weeks.
“It took about two weeks,” to scrub the bottom of the pool, Trump said in April, “and now we have a nice, clean surface on which we’re putting an industrial-grade swimming pool topping,” he continued.
Get breaking National news
Get breaking Canada news delivered to your inbox as it happens so you won’t miss a trending story.
He also revealed that there were plans to remove the pool’s granite lining and replace it with stone elements, a project that would have taken three years at a cost of US$300 million.
Trump has said he would refinish the pool before. In a March Truth Social post, he said he and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum were “working on fixing the absolutely filthy Reflecting Pool between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument.”
According to The Guardian and CNN, early visitors to the upgraded pool noticed workers removing clumps of algae from the structure.
Katie Martin, a spokesperson for the U.S. Department of the Interior, told CNN, “What you are seeing is residual algae from the supply lines, which have been sitting dormant for eight weeks while construction has been taking place,” asserting the algae buildup was “part of the normal startup process.”
Organic matter at the edge of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool on June 11, 2026, in Washington, D.C. The pool opened to the public earlier this week.
Maxine Wallace/The Washington Post via Getty Images
“We are removing the algae, and the nanobubblers will maintain the pool and keep it algae-free,” she said, CNN reported.
Trump has, in the recent past, made false claims that former presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama spent “hundreds of millions of dollars” to fix the site.
Obama presided over a multimillion-dollar renovation of the pool, but the final bill was nowhere near Trump’s estimate. And the Biden administration did not conduct any major work. As for Trump, federal spending records show that costs are significantly higher than he claims.
The pool, originally built in the 1920s, sits between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument and is considered one of the most iconic sites in Washington.
The restoration of the Lincoln Memorial follows the preliminary approval of plans to construct a 250-foot-tall “Triumphal Arch,” the revamping of the Kennedy Center, which will close after July 4, and the demolition of the White House East Wing to build a ballroom with an underground bunker, though the latter faces extensive legal and public pushback.
— with files from The Associated Press
© 2026 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.
