Trump to Give His Closing Election Speech at the Reflecting Pool on Monday, the Eve of the Midterms

President Donald Trump will close his midterm campaign where American history is written largest. The president will deliver remarks on Monday, November 2 at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in Washington, a White House official said Sunday, in an appearance the Washington Sun reported is likely to serve as his closing message for a monthslong rally blitz ahead of Tuesday's elections. The speech comes just hours before voters head to the polls, per the USA Today live file's account of the announcement, and a senior White House official told the Wall Street Journal the remarks will focus on the agenda advanced by his administration and Republicans in Congress since the start of his second term.

The closing stop follows more than two dozen in-person rallies across the country, the Washington Sun reported, at which Trump stumped for Republicans in competitive statewide races — including Senate nominees Ken Paxton in Texas and Mike Rogers in Michigan — and encouraged crowds to vote as if he himself were on the ballot. Trump told reporters in Iowa on Sunday, as he arrived for that day's rallies, that he planned to speak at the Reflecting Pool "to show how beautiful it is." The president has made restoring the pool a priority of his broader effort to update Washington's landmarks, per the Journal's account.

The setting carries its own argument, and its own controversy. The Reflecting Pool is the site of Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech from the Lincoln Memorial steps in 1963, and of President Barack Obama's marking of that speech's 50th anniversary there in 2013, the Washington Sun noted. The Associated Press account of Sunday's announcement reported that speaking at the site also pushes the president's slow, expensive and problem-plagued efforts to repair the pool back into the spotlight: the administration has said vandals cut the pool's bottom, hired contractors to resurface it in a finish it called "American Flag Blue," and saw chunks of the material partially detach and algae blooms turn the water bright green shortly after the work was completed in late June, per the Washington Sun's account of the restoration. Both characterizations — the White House's beautification case and the repair record reported by the wire — are carried here as their sources state them.