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A majority of Americans don’t approve of President Trump’s renovation efforts in the U.S.’s capital city, according to a new survey.
The president has undertaken a series of controversial beautification projects around Washington, D.C., including updating the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, replacing the East Wing of the White House with a multi-million-dollar ballroom and constructing a massive replica of Paris’ Arc de Triomphe near the National Mall.
A new Washington Post-Ipsos poll asked respondents how they felt about this trio of projects. Nearly 2 in 3 respondents — or 65 percent of those surveyed — reacted negatively, with 27 percent indicating dissatisfaction and 38 percent saying they were “upset” by these efforts.
Among those with positive reactions, 12 percent said they were “enthusiastic” and 19 percent said they were “satisfied” with these projects.
The poll found a partisan split on this issue. Nearly 7 in 10 of Republican respondents expressed a positive view of these renovations, while about 9 in 10 of the survey’s Democratic respondents expressed a negative view.
Additionally, the poll asked respondents about Trump’s motivations for these projects. Twenty-six percent said they believed he was committed to making the capital city “more beautiful,” while 51 percent said they thought the president had a “different goal.”
When the latter group was asked what they believed this alternate objective was, 42 percent said to “glorify himself” and 22 percent said to “leave his mark” on D.C.
The survey’s researchers noted that these results do not reveal discrepancies between perceptions of individual projects but instead group all three together. Previous polling has indicated that the public is more widely opposed to the ballroom project than the arch or Reflecting Pool.
The proposed ballroom has raised concerns over its cost to taxpayers after the project’s price tag was raised from an initial $400 million to a reported $600 million earlier this year. Trump has defended the multi-million-dollar project, saying it would be covered entirely by private donations.
However, records reported by the Post in June showed that only $293 million of the total cost would be covered by “private sources,” while the rest would come from taxpayer-funded department budgets.
The Reflecting Pool project has also faced a wave of criticism over the peeling of its newly-installed “American flag blue” base and an algae outbreak shortly after the renovation’s completion. Crews drained the pool again after Independence Day to address these issues.
The Washington Post-Ipsos poll surveyed over 2,600 U.S. adults from July 8-13 with a margin of error of approximately 1.9 percentage points.
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