Trump Fires Back: I Fixed the Pool in Weeks for $10 Million While Obama and Biden Wasted $147 Million and Never Opened It
President Trump shredded a skeptical reporter who tried to ding him over the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool renovation, turning the question into a masterclass on government waste versus real results.
Reporter: “In April, you showed us pictures of what you were going to do at the pool and you said you had a guy who was going to do it in a week for about a million dollars. Well, it’s been two months and sixteen and a half million dollars.”
Trump: “Yeah, okay, ready? Barack Hussein Obama, have you ever heard of him?”
Trump then unloaded on the previous administration’s failures. “He spent two years and over a hundred million dollars on trying to fix it. You know what happened to it? Never even opened. He took the water from the river, you know about that, right? It turned out to be putrid and it destroyed the whole thing. Spent over a hundred million. Him and Biden together spent a hundred and forty-seven million dollars. You know what happened? Never opened. You don’t mention that, right?”
When the reporter pressed on the current costs, Trump hit back hard on the numbers. “I spent, we spent about ten. Many of the, much of the money we spent are park workers. They’re there whether they do this or not, as you know. They work in the park and they’re very good workers. They did a great job. So, they were going to spend three to four hundred million dollars, you know that. And it was going to take four years. I spent, I spent about six, seven weeks and I spent probably in terms of outside, probably ten million dollars, around ten million. They say sixteen, but a lot of that is workers that work for the same thing. So they were going to spend four hundred million, I spent ten. They were going to spend four years, I spent two months, maybe less. And I have a better product.”
Trump dismissed the vandalism excuses from critics: “Now, I can’t help it if somebody goes in with a knife and starts hacking it up. And we also have pictures of it, you know, we have pictures.”
When asked to release the photos, Trump shot back: “Yeah, at the right time you’ll see it. You’ll see it in court. You’ll see it in court.”