President Donald Trump told Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer last month that he was finally ready to drop his freeze on billions of dollars in funding for a major infrastructure project in New York.
But there was one condition: In exchange for the money, Schumer had to agree to rename New York’s Pennsylvania Station and Washington Dulles International Airport after Trump.
Two people familiar with the matter described the shocking offer, but Schumer quickly rejected it, telling the president he didn’t have the authority to accommodate such an unorthodox request.
In the weeks since, Trump has continued to withhold more than $16 billion from the long-planned Gateway project, which would connect New York and New Jersey through a new rail tunnel under the Hudson River.
The two states are currently suing the Trump administration over the freeze, arguing 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.
Passengers at Moynihan Station in Penn Station, New York, on January 23. -Adam Gray/Bloomberg/Getty Images/File
The incident, first reported by Punchbowl, provides a new window into Trump’s ever-expanding efforts to secure a place in American history — and does so in part by having his name slapped on just about everything around him.
Since returning to the White House, the president has launched a series of initiatives bearing Trump’s name, including the Trump Gold Card, which offers a high-priced path to citizenship, the TrumpRx website, which offers low-cost prescription drugs, and a new Trump-class warship designed to solidify his “peace through strength” era of foreign policy in the coming years.
In recent months, Trump has set his sights on bigger goals: first adding his name to the U.S. Institute of Peace and then, more controversially, to the iconic Kennedy Center in Washington.
Still, Trump’s offer to Schumer may be his boldest move yet, an apparent attempt to leverage the future of big infrastructure projects for his own personal wishes.
The commission responsible for the Gateway Tunnel has warned that if the Trump administration does not release needed funds, it will soon have to halt construction on the project and lay off about 1,000 workers.
Construction of the tunnel predates Trump’s return to office, and the federal government is shouldering a large portion of the funding needed to complete it. But Trump moved late last year to halt the project, a decision that Democratic officials in New Jersey and New York argued was politically motivated.
Schumer has since played a central role in negotiations to try to unfreeze the funds. Yet despite this priority, Democrats can hardly put Trump’s name on Penn Station or Dulles Airport alone.
Although some conservative lawmakers have introduced legislation to rename Dulles Airport “Donald J. Trump International Airport,” it has gained little support so far.
The legislation has yet to advance in the Republican-controlled Congress and remains unlikely to pass.
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