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Trump Participates in a Rose Garden Club Dinner, May 11, 2026

May 11, 2026 · The White House · 0:31:13

Embedded from the source channel — never re-uploaded. Watch on YouTube

What happened

President Donald Trump welcomed guests to a Rose Garden Club dinner at the White House on May 11, 2026 — an evening, as he told the room, honoring police: “I said, ‘I’m very busy tonight. I don’t have time for dinner.’ And they said, ‘Oh, it’s the police we’re honoring.’ Oh, I’ll have dinner.” Vice President JD Vance and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum were among those he introduced from the podium.

Much of the President’s remarks walked the guests through the rebuilt White House grounds — the Rose Garden’s new granite in place of the old grass (“People got tired of standing in mud… the White House, you don’t realize this, it’s built on a wetland”) — and then to the Reflecting Pool restoration he is running with Secretary Burgum: a basin “2,500 feet” long, “almost 200 feet wide,” which, as he stated it, prior efforts had spent $54 million trying to fix and which engineers priced at $350 to $400 million over four years. “I said, ‘I think we can do it for less.’ So I called people that do swimming pools,” he said.

Why it matters

The Rose Garden Club dinners are the President’s working evenings with the constituencies he is courting — here, law enforcement, in the week of the National Peace Officers’ Memorial Service — and this one carries his fullest telling of the Reflecting Pool restoration economics, a grounds project he returned to through the summer. It is recorded on the Elections & Governance hub with the other Rose Garden evenings.

Scoreboard watch

The Reflecting Pool figures as stated by the President — $54 million spent by a prior administration, a $350–400 million / four-year engineering estimate, and his cheaper, faster alternative — are the baseline for the completed project’s cost and timeline as they are reported.

Sources: The White House, “President Trump Participates in a Rose Garden Club Dinner,” The White House, May 11, 2026 (official upload, embedded above). All figures and characterizations as stated by President Trump at the dinner.