What happened
President Donald Trump told Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) last month that he would unfreeze funds earmarked for a $16 billion New York infrastructure project, but only if New York’s Penn Station and Washington Dulles International Airport were renamed for him, several news organizations reported on Thursday. Schumer declined. “There was nothing to trade,” a person close to Schumer told NBC News and Politico. Trump “can restart the funding with a snap of his fingers.”
Who said what
Trump froze funding to complete the Hudson Gateway rail tunnel connecting New York City to New Jersey in October, after threatening to punish Democrats for shutting down the government. White House budget director Russ Vought said the halt was to “ensure” the funds weren’t used “on unconstitutional DEI principles.”
Trump’s naming-rights demand “offers a fresh window” into his “ever-expanding effort to secure an outsized place in American history” by “branding nearly everything around him with his own name,” CNN said. He has already affixed his name to the Kennedy Center and U.S. Institute for Peace, as well as a class of battleship, a Trump Gold Card citizenship pathway and TrumpRx, a discount drug site launched Thursday. But attempting to “leverage the future of a massive infrastructure project to fulfill his own personal wishes” would be “perhaps his most audacious move yet.”
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What next?
Trump putting “his own narcissism over the good-paying union jobs this project provides” is “ridiculous,” Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) said in a statement. “These naming rights aren’t tradable as part of any negotiations, and neither is the dignity of New Yorkers.” Without the funding, the Gateway project “is set to shut down indefinitely” on Friday, Axios said.
