“I want to welcome you to the Rose Garden. You know, this is a whole new thing. This used to be grass,” he said.
“And took a little heat from my wife. She said, ‘Darling, what did you do with my grass?
“I said ‘People got tired and standing in mud.'”
Twenty minutes in, his speech became profane.
“I was told by my wife, ‘you have to act presidential, so don’t use foul language’,” Trump said.
“I won’t. Therefore, normally I would have said it was a s— house, but I don’t want to say that.”
He started to detail his grievances with the building.
“The columns were falling down, the plaster was falling off,” he said.
“This place is tippy top now, including all the brand new beautiful stone.”
He then began to describe his proposed ballroom, before repeating the false claim that a Democratic Congresswoman married her brother.
The pool has been drained to be repainted blue at Trump’s request.
The government awarded the renovators with a no-bid contract last month after claiming the need for repairs was so urgent.
Yesterday a lawsuit was filed by a Washington non-profit to prevent the pool from being repainted blue.
“The Reflecting Pool’s profound reflective quality—achieved through deliberate design choices, including the dark color of its basin—creates the sweeping mirror image of the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument that millions of visitors experience every year,” the lawsuit states.
“The dark grey, achromatic basin was not incidental to the design. It was the design.”
The group argued the administration had not taken into consideration a law that prevents the alteration of historic landmarks without proper scrutiny.
