President Donald Trump told Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer last month that he was finally ready to lift 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 surprising offer, which was described by two people familiar with the conversation, was quickly rejected by Schumer, who told the president that he did not have the power to carry out such an unorthodox request.
In the weeks since, Trump has continued to withhold more than $16 billion earmarked for the long-planned Gateway project that would connect New York and New Jersey through a new rail tunnel under the Hudson River.
Both states are now suing the Trump administration over the freeze, alleging in a complaint filed earlier this week that the funding freeze is illegal.
A spokesman for Schumer declined to comment. The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
Commuters in Moynihan Train Hall at Penn Station in New York on January 23. – Adam Gray/Bloomberg/Getty Images/File
The episode, first reported by Punchbowl, offers a new window into Trump’s ever-expanding effort to secure a big place in American history — and to do so in part by branding almost everything around him with his own name.
Since returning to the White House, the president has introduced a slew of initiatives that bear the Trump name, including the Trump Gold Card that offers a high-cost path to citizenship, the TrumpRx website that offers low-cost drugs, and a new Trump-class battleship intended to solidify his era of “peace through health” foreign policy for years to come.
Trump in recent months has set his sights on even bigger goals: Adding his name first to the US Institute of Peace and then, more controversially, to Washington’s iconic Kennedy Center.
Still, Trump’s offer to Schumer represented perhaps his most daring move yet, an apparent attempt to exploit the future of a massive infrastructure project to further his own personal desires.
The commission in charge of the Gateway tunnel has warned that it will soon have to close work on the project and lay off around 1,000 workers if the Trump administration does not release the funds it needs.
Construction of the tunnel 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 argued was politically motivated.
Schumer has since played a central role in trying to negotiate the funding freeze. However despite that priority, there is little the Democrat can 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,” so far it has 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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