A hulking 250-foot triumphal arch embellished in gold. A reflecting pool now tinted dark blue. Decorative fountains scattered across the capital that cost tens of millions of dollars to renovate.
President Trump, who has long leaned into his roots as a real estate developer, has started renovation projects around Washington as he looks to remake the capital in his own image. To address criticisms of ballooning costs and preservation concerns, Mr. Trump has insisted that the initiatives have historic precedent and represent his prowess at deal-making and instinct to take action.
Here’s a fact-check.
What Was Said
False. Mr. Trump has proposed building a 250-foot-tall arch at one end of the Arlington Memorial Bridge, which links the Lincoln Memorial in Washington to the Robert E. Lee Memorial in Arlington, Va. But the bridge was designed and built to commemorate the reunification of the North and South after the Civil War, so Mr. Trump’s claim that efforts to build an arch at the site were interrupted by the Civil War is anachronistic.
A White House spokesman argued that the triumphal arch would be built in the classical tradition in keeping with other prominent Washington landmarks, but did not provide evidence for historical attempts to erect an arch.
The claim that there was a push to build an arch that began before the Civil War may originate from — and distort — a Fourth of July speech in 1851 by Daniel Webster, who was the secretary of state. He claimed that President Andrew Jackson had “desired to span” the Potomac River “with arches of ever-enduring granite, symbolical of the firmly established union of the North and the South.”
Webster’s description of granite arches appeared to refer to the arched structures supporting the bridge, according to Bob Dover, a geologist who wrote a recent book on the history of bridges in Washington.
And the bridge Webster and Jackson had in mind might have been the Long Bridge, another bridge connecting Washington to Virginia that is south of the Memorial Bridge, closer to the Jefferson Memorial, according to the Federal Highway Administration.
The Treasury Department in 1832 under Jackson invited proposals for a new bridge there after its wood structure was damaged by floods. Jackson and members of his cabinet were present at the reopening in 1835. And a 1839 newspaper dispatch criticized a Virginia lawmaker for favoring the cheaper option of wood rather than Jackson’s apparently unused vision of a bridge supported by “eternal arches of massive stone.”
Whatever bridge Jackson might have envisioned, the Congressional Research Service was unable to find statements from any president or his staff advocating the construction of a triumphal arch in Washington before Mr. Trump’s second term, the office said in response to a request from Representative Steve Cohen, Democrat of Tennessee.
Efforts to erect a commemorative bridge did not begin in earnest until 1886. Congress held a design contest, and the winning proposal did include two Roman triumphal arches, but that design was ultimately scrapped.
When a congressional commission unveiled the McMillan Plan in 1902, it called for the reconstruction of the National Mall and a bridge to span from the proposed Lincoln Memorial to Arlington National Cemetery. Under the plan, the bridge’s “low-level design was essential” to not eclipse the Lincoln Memorial and other monuments, according to a report about the Memorial Bridge by the Historic American Engineering Record. No other designs after the plan included a triumphal arch.
What Was Said
False. Mr. Trump recently celebrated the completion of some repairs to the Reflecting Pool at the Lincoln Memorial that began earlier this spring. During the construction phase, he repeatedly marveled about the large size of the pool and the large cost of previous repairs. But his figures were incorrect.
The Reflecting Pool is about 2,028 feet long and 167 feet wide. If its length was the height of a skyscraper, three buildings — the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, the Merdeka in Kuala Lumpur, and the Shanghai Tower in Shanghai — would still be taller.
Taylor Rogers, a White House spokeswoman, repeated Mr. Trump’s assertion that his predecessors “squandered” money but did not provide evidence that hundreds of millions of dollars had been spent.
Mr. Trump has a point that structural problems began to emerge quickly after the pool’s completion in the 1920s. The pool sometimes attracted ice skaters and swimmers, though local newspapers warned Washingtonians about scheduled repairs to cracks and cleanings of accumulated vegetation.
In 1929, contractors began laying a reinforced concrete bottom. Drainage trenches were installed alongside the rows of elm trees in the 1930s, according to a 1999 National Park Service report. In 1981, a reconstruction tried to address the issues by using a “self-sustaining ecological system.” A 1986 report found that the joints and structural components were failing and that water leaks had damaged the pool’s foundation.
But major repairs did not occur until 2009, when the National Park Service began planning for restoration with stimulus funding. The pool reopened in 2012, with $35.3 million awarded to a construction company in Maryland for the repair work. That included removing algae, tearing out and replacing the old pool bottom, installing new water circulation and filtration systems, building a new pump structure and adding other features like wheelchair ramps and new lighting, The Washington Post reported.
The Biden administration did not start any major repairs. It awarded two contracts, totaling about $230,000, to a Colorado landscape architect for proposals to rehabilitate the pool. Charles F. Sams III, the director of the National Park Service from 2021 to 2025, said that the cost of full rehabilitation — including fixing pipes and leakage — would have been more than $100 million, but the Biden administration did not move forward with any plans.
So, in total, the Biden and Obama administrations spent about $35.5 million on major repairs and proposals to rehabilitate the reflecting pool — far less than Mr. Trump’s estimate of “hundreds of millions of dollars.”
In contrast, Mr. Trump’s renovation has cost more than $14 million to reseal the pool and add blue-tinted coating, an update that may not address other underlying problems.
What Was Said
This is exaggerated. It is true that many federally managed fountains in Washington have been inoperable for years, but Mr. Trump overstated the problem.
The National Park Service manages the vast majority, about 6,500 acres, of parkland in Washington and at least 30 decorative fountains and water features. The Park Service announced in January that it would rehabilitate or upgrade fountains at 18 sites, including nine with fountains that were “inoperable.” It has spent least $60 million in park entrance fees to fix those fountains.
In total, there were 12 inoperable fountains across nine sites on the list, including at Columbus Plaza at Union Station, the city’s central train and bus hub and at Freedom Plaza, a few blocks southeast of the White House.
The White House also listed two more sites with four fountains that were previously inoperable: two at the Kahlil Gibran Memorial, one of which has been fixed; and two at Theodore Roosevelt Island.
The White House also cited 14 fountains at 11 sites as nonfunctional, but they appeared to be working, according to the Park Service, local news sources and tourist photos, including five at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Memorial on the National Mall, the reflecting pool at the Korean War Veterans Memorial and the water wall at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial.
There are at least four other operational fountains maintained by the Park Service, such as the one at the World War I Memorial.
Beyond the Park Service, the Smithsonian Institution, which also relies on federal funding, also operates a number of fountains that have been working. And the Architect of the Capitol, a federal agency of the legislative branch, also maintains more than 20 water features.
