President Donald Trump said Thursday that a new walkway will be built connecting the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC, to the Potomac River.
(CNN) — President Donald Trump said Thursday that a new walkway will be built connecting the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC, to the Potomac River.
“We’re going to call it the promenade,” he told reporters in the Oval Office.
“They want to call it the Trump Promenade,” the president said. “But I don’t know if I want to do that. But it’s going to be beautiful.”
Trump said the project would revive what he described as the memorial’s original intended design.
“The Lincoln Memorial — the front was supposed to be the back. The back was supposed to be the front. It never got built, because they built two roadways behind it after it was built, and it shut off the gateway to the water,” he said.
“That was really going to be the main entry, and we’re going to be doing that,” the president said, adding that “we have a way of beautifully going over those two roads.”
Asked for additional details, the White House referred CNN to Trump’s comments.
The announcement is just the latest of Trump’s efforts to renovate Washington, DC. He’s pushing forward with a controversial overhaul of the Reflecting Pool, which he also touted in the Oval Office on Thursday.
“The water is pouring in as we speak, and maybe we’ll show what it looks like,” Trump said, directing attention to a laptop on his desk that played footage of the water.
“Nice, clean water,” he added. “That’s the longest pool anywhere in the world.”
For the second consecutive day, he also displayed a large chart titled “Our Pool is Bigger than Skyscrapers” that he used to compare the length of the Reflecting Pool to the heights of iconic buildings, including New York’s Empire State Building.
Trump’s attempts to put his imprint on the nation’s capital suffered a blow on Thursday, however, when the Kennedy Center instructed staff to begin removing his name from the performing arts center to comply with a recent court order.
The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2026 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.
