President Donald Trump told Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer last month that he was ready to lift a freeze on billions of dollars for a major New York infrastructure project. But the offer came with a twist that stopped the conversation cold.
According to two people familiar with the exchange, Trump said the funding would move only if Schumer agreed to rename New York’s Penn Station and Washington’s Dulles International Airport after him. Schumer rejected the proposal outright, telling the president he lacked the authority to carry out such a request.
Since then, the money has remained locked up. More than $16 billion earmarked for the Gateway project, a long-planned rail tunnel linking New York and New Jersey beneath the Hudson River, is still being withheld by the Trump administration. Both states have now sued, arguing in a complaint filed earlier this week that the funding freeze is unlawful.
Schumer’s office declined to comment, and the White House did not respond to a request for comment.
The episode, first reported by Punchbowl, offers another glimpse into Trump’s increasingly personal approach to power, and his determination to stamp his name onto the country’s most visible institutions. Since returning to the White House, Trump has rolled out a growing list of initiatives branded with his name, from the Trump Gold Card offering a costly route to citizenship, to the TrumpRx website promoting cheaper prescription drugs, to a proposed Trump-class battleship meant to enshrine his “peace through strength” doctrine.
In recent months, his ambitions have widened. Trump has pushed to add his name to the US Institute of Peace and, more controversially, to Washington’s Kennedy Center. Even by those standards, the demand relayed to Schumer stands out — an apparent attempt to trade the future of a critical public works project for a personal naming legacy.
The Gateway tunnel commission has warned that without the federal funds, it will soon have to halt construction and lay off roughly 1,000 workers. The project predates Trump’s return to office and relies on significant federal backing, but the administration moved to stop the money late last year. Democratic officials in New York and New Jersey say the decision was politically motivated.
Schumer has been a central figure in efforts to negotiate a release of the funds. Yet even if he were inclined to entertain Trump’s proposal, he has no direct power to rename either Penn Station or Dulles. While a handful of conservative lawmakers have floated legislation to rechristen Dulles as “Donald J. Trump International Airport,” the idea has gone nowhere in the GOP-controlled Congress.
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