President Donald Trump traveled to Wisconsin for a roundtable event where he rambled through his administration’s agenda and showed farmers printed pictures of his Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool project.
Despite the Chippewa Falls event being labeled as a roundtable, it was more of a rally-style gathering with Trump doing the majority of the talking and then asking other participants at the table to speak “quickly” so he could “get back to fighting a war.”
Trump spent about 45 minutes on Friday boasting about his perceived wins upon returning to the White House while going off on tangents about the Iran war, which he started at the end of February, border security and his latest passion project in Washington, D.C.
Early in his speech — which he gave sitting down at a horseshoe-shaped table with the likes of Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins and Republican Representative Derrick Van Orden — Trump showed off a graphic about the size of his reflecting pool compared to famous skyscrapers.
“It’s double and triple the size in terms of area” of the Willis Tower in Chicago and the Empire State Building and One World Trade Center in New York City, Trump said of the reflecting pool while holding up a graphic printed on computer paper.
Trump asked the audience whether they could see the printed pictures, saying that he was “too cheap” to put up a projector.
Holding up another sheet of paper with a photo of the pool, which is painted with a so-called American flag blue shade, Trump called it “the most beautiful thing that you’ve ever seen.”
Trump has been flaunting the size comparison of the pool for weeks now, with an odd graphic showing the pool’s length at 2,030 feet, and the heights of One World Trade Center, the Empire State Building and the Willis Tower at 1,776 feet, 1,454 feet and 1,451 feet, respectively.
Trump said at the roundtable that the pool was actually 2,500 feet long.
The president did have a larger board to show off the graphic to reporters in the Oval Office on Wednesday, but it appears he didn’t bring it to the roundtable.
Trump said Wednesday his project was essentially completed, with the White House announcing Thursday that the water for the pool had started flowing.
The president also expressed his love for farmers at Friday’s roundtable and urged his supporters to vote Republican in the midterm elections.
“We love the farmers. We love everything about your state. We won your state by a lot, and we’ve had great success here in Wisconsin, and we brought a lot of business to Wisconsin,” Trump said.
Trump won Wisconsin in the 2024 election by less than a percentage point against former Vice President Kamala Harris.
“I love the place, and hopefully you’re going to be voting Republican, because frankly, Republican is, I call it, the sane way to go,” he added.
