President Donald Trump announced on Thursday a plan to construct a pedestrian bridge connecting the Lincoln Memorial directly to the Potomac River.Trump announced the “breaking news” during an Oval Office event promoting “clean, beautiful coal” as an energy source.“We’re doing something that just came up. We’ll have a little breaking news here, because nobody’s heard of it, but at the Lincoln Memorial, the front was supposed to be the back, the back was supposed to be the front,” the president told a gathered group of reporters. “It never got built because they built two roadways behind it after it was built, and it shut off the gateway to the water that was really going to be the main entry.”
The comments came shortly after workers began filling the memorial’s Reflecting Pool, the final step in the president’s renovation of the historic landmark. Trump said the connection between the Lincoln Memorial and the Potomac would be called “the promenade.”
“They want to call it the Trump Promenade, but I don’t know if I want to do that,” Trump said. “It’s going to be beautiful. It’s a beautiful project, and it’s going to take the Lincoln Memorial right down to the Potomac, which it was always scheduled to do.”
