In a hilarious way of getting back at his political enemies, President Trump decided to withhold $18 billion in federal funding for New York’s Gateway Program and the Second Avenue Subway Phase 2 project, which would have been a major win for Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY).
Explaining this decision, Trump called the canceled projects fiscally irresponsible. Predictably, Schumer melted down and labeled the move “vindictive” and harmful to commuters and jobs. However, this is just one of several times when the Trump administration has clashed with Democrats over infrastructure.
Kicking off the controversy, President Trump launched this project. “We’re cutting a $20 billion project that Schumer fought for 15 years to get… and I’m cutting the project. The project’s gonna be dead,” he said, triggering the Democrats.
Losing his mind in a response to the president, Sen. Schumer, a New Yorker, slammed the move as “vindictive, reckless, and foolish.” Additionally, he argued the decision would hurt “hundreds of thousands of New York and New Jersey commuters” and cost “good-paying jobs.”
Offering additional comments to the press on Air Force One, the president declared, “As of now, it’s terminated. And that’s up to me, and as of now, it’s terminated. And it’s terminated because the Democrats are so foolish for what they’ve done to the country.”
Building on this point, he stated, “I mean, we have the hottest country in the world. There’s no country even close. And they just want to do this [shutdown]. You know, there’s nothing for them to do. All they have to do is just say, ‘Let everything continue.’ And I will say, a lot of Democrats want this to get over. Right now there is no funding, because it’s up to me.”
Watch Trump comment in the White House on terminating the program here:
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Earlier this year, as we reported, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy threatened to pull funding from New York, citing rampant violence and crime in the NYC subway. “We give millions of dollars a year to the New York subway, and part of the requirement is they keep it safe,” Duffy argued.
Additionally, he noted, “And so, what we’re going to do is say, ‘Listen, if you can’t keep your subways safe. If people can’t go to the subway and not be afraid of being stabbed or thrown in front of tracks or burnt, and we can’t consider the subway a subway and not a homeless shelter, we’re going to pull your money.’”
Concluding his comments, he laid the blame squarely at the feet of the Democrats. “And it’s not just to New York; it’ll be Chicago, it’ll be Washington, D.C. The American people expect their subways to be places where they can come in and out of cities and do it safely. If they don’t get on board to change their ways, we’re pulling cash,” Sean Duffy declared.
Frantically reacting to that dire news, Gov. Kathy Hochul initially was defiant, saying, “Tell Sean Duffy, we’ve got this.” However, ultimately she was forced to cave and stated, “I want to see uniformed police on the platforms, but more importantly, we will put an officer on every single train, overnight – 9 p.m. to 5 a.m. – over the next six months and the state will support these efforts financially.”
Featured image credit: By I, DavidShankbone, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2301835