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To make things even weirder: It is wrong.
Donald Trump has a knack for posting things on Truth Social that make you wonder: Why?
One of those posts came yesterday, when the president shared a picture showing that the Lincoln Reflecting Pool is longer than some skyscrapers are tall.
Confused? You’re not alone.
But let’s take a look at the picture and dig a little deeper.
The post
Trump released the post on June 4, showing that the Lincoln Reflecting Pool is 2,030 feet long (or tall if turned vertically).
It is then compared to the Willis (Sears) Tower in Chicago, which stands 1,451 feet tall; the Empire State Building in New York, which stands 1,454 feet tall; and One World Trade Center in New York, which stands 1,776 feet tall.
Article continues below.
What he is leaving out
During a Cabinet meeting on May 27, Trump said that the Reflecting Pool is “longer than the tallest building in the world, if you set it on its side,” PBS reports.
That is outright wrong, as three skyscrapers are actually taller than the pool if we are using Trump’s method of measurement.
The Shanghai Tower stands at 2,073 feet, Merdeka 118 in Kuala Lumpur stands at 2,227 feet, and the tallest building in the world, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, stands at a staggering 2,717 feet.
So that is clearly wrong, but let’s look at another metric: Total volume.
A big pool indeed, but…
According to a press release published following a renovation of the Reflecting Pool in 2012, the pool holds roughly 4 million US gallons of water.
Now, if we imagine the three skyscrapers in the picture as hollow containers filled with water and use the height, width, and length of the buildings to calculate their total volume, we get:
- The Willis (Sears) Tower: roughly 394 million US gallons of water
- The Empire State Building: roughly 244 million US gallons of water
- One World Trade Center: roughly 300 million US gallons of water
So the Reflecting Pool is not bigger than the three skyscrapers when measured by volume—only when comparing the length of the pool to the height of the buildings.
Editorial note: We utilized the official 4 million-gallon capacity issued by the U.S. Department of the Interior following the pool’s 2012 structural overhaul. Some older encyclopedias and online sources still reference the pool’s pre-2012 capacity of 6.75 million gallons. However, even using the older, larger historical figure, the skyscrapers still vastly exceed the pool’s volume by hundreds of millions of gallons.
