Trump promises Schumer funding for NY tunnel project — if Penn Station and Dulles Airport are renamed after him
Trump promises Schumer funding for NY tunnel project — if Penn Station and Dulles Airport are renamed after him
President Donald Trump told Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer last month that he was finally prepared to drop his freeze on billions of dollars in funding for a major New York infrastructure project.
But there was a condition: In exchange for the money, Schumer had to agree to rename New York’s Penn Station and Washington’s Dulles International Airport after Trump.
The startling offer, which was described by two people familiar with the conversation, was swiftly rejected by Schumer, who told the president he didn’t have the power to deliver on such an unorthodox request.
In the weeks since, Trump has continued to withhold the more than $16 billion earmarked for the long-planned Gateway project connecting New York and New Jersey through a new rail tunnel beneath the Hudson River.
The two states are now suing the Trump administration over the freeze, alleging in a complaint filed earlier this week that the funding suspension is unlawful.
A spokesperson for Schumer declined to comment. The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
The episode, first reported by Punchbowl, offers a fresh window into Trump’s ever-expanding effort to secure an outsized place in American history — and to do so in part by branding nearly everything around him with his own name.
Since returning to the White House, the president has introduced a slew of initiatives bearing the Trump name, including the Trump Gold Card offering a high-priced path to citizenship, the TrumpRx website offering lower-priced prescription drugs, and a new Trump-class battleship meant to solidify his era of “peace through strength” foreign policy for years to come.
Trump in recent months has set his sights on even bigger targets: Adding his name first to the US Institute of Peace and then, even more controversially, to Washington’s iconic Kennedy Center.
Still, Trump’s offer to Schumer would have represented perhaps his most audacious move yet, an apparent attempt to leverage the future of a massive infrastructure project to fulfill his own personal wishes.
The commission in charge of the Gateway tunnel has warned that it will soon have to shut down work on the project and lay off roughly 1,000 workers if the Trump administration does not release the funding it needs.
The tunnel’s construction predates Trump’s return to office, with the federal government on the hook for a significant portion of the funding needed to complete it. But Trump moved to halt the project late last year, a decision that Democratic officials in New Jersey and New York have argued was politically motivated.
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Schumer has since played a central role in trying to negotiate the unfreezing of the funding. Yet despite that priority, there’s little that the Democrat could conceivably do on his own to put Trump’s name on either Penn Station or Dulles Airport.
While some conservative lawmakers have already introduced legislation to rename Dulles as the “Donald J. Trump International Airport,” it’s so far gained little traction.
The legislation has not advanced in the GOP-controlled Congress, and as a result remains unlikely to pass.
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