President Donald Trump on Thursday forced a group of administration officials and pharmaceutical executives appearing with him at an Oval Office event on drug prices to stand behind his desk as he rambled for more than ten minutes about using his eponymous hotel company's preferred swimming pool builder to renovate the iconic reflecting pool on the National Mall.
Healthcare Event Derailed
The president had been listening to executives from Regeneron, the company behind the Covid-19 treatment that saved his life when he contracted the coronavirus in October 2020, and some of his top health care advisers discuss an agreement to include the company's medications on the government's 'TrumpRx' website. However, he somehow segued from speaking about re-shoring semiconductor manufacturing to renovations he has ordered up at the White House and around Washington.
Trump's Rant on the Reflecting Pool
'The other thing that we're doing that's taking place right now is the Lincoln Memorial has a beautiful reflecting pond, or lake. He called it a pool, lake and pond. Everything is different, but the word reflecting is a good term,' Trump said. He complained that the 2,030 by 167 foot pool, which was built in 1922 between the Lincoln Memorial and Washington Monument, 'never looked great' because the stone on the bottom of the pool was 'not really meant to be a stone that's underwater for that much of a period of time.'
Trump also suggested that a 'friend' from Germany had similarly knocked the landmark's condition as 'filthy, disgusting,' and 'not representative of the country' while telling reporters that the Biden administration had solicited bids to renovate the pool that had come in at '$301 million' and take as many as 'three and a half years.'
Personal Contractor Solution
He told reporters he'd decided to instead employ a contractor he'd used to build pools at his company's various hotels. 'As a developer, I've probably built more than 100 swimming pools, different buildings. I built, and I have some really good pool builder ... but over the years, I've had three or four really good ones,' he said. 'I took the best of the three. I had all three go, but I ended up taking the best. And I said, when you take a look at this, it's 2200 feet long.'
Trump then recounted how he'd told Interior Secretary Doug Burgum that he'd asked his 'pool guy' to look at the Reflecting Pool project and had been told the renovation could be done in a matter of weeks for far less than what had been bid previously. 'I said, I have an idea. I'm going to send my contractor over and take a look. He looked at it ... he said it's really decaying and it's a terrible condition, but if you would, I'd like to work two weeks on cleaning it up ... and he said 'it'd take me two weeks,'' he said. 'Our job will take one week. It will cost about a million and a half dollars.'
Trump then told reporters the reflecting pool project 'is being done now' as he showed off photos of the ongoing work.
