White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt appeared to contradict claims by Donald Trump that he had not asked to rename New York’s Penn Station after himself.
“It was something the president floated in his conversation with Chuck Schumer,” Leavitt said Tuesday, in response to a question about why the president was interested in changing the name of the building. “Why not?”
Her remarks come following reports last week that Trump said he would unfreeze millions of dollars in federal funds for a $16 billion New York infrastructure project if Senator Schumer agreed to rename New York’s Penn Station and Virginia’s Dulles International Airport after him.
On Friday, Trump claimed that it had in fact been the Senate Minority Leader’s idea to rename the two buildings.
“He suggested that to me,” the president told reporters on his way to Mar-a-Lago for the weekend. “Chuck Schumer suggested that to me, about changing the name of Penn Station to Trump Station. Dulles Airport is really separate.”
Shortly after the exchange was reported Schumer posted an angry rebuttal online.
“Absolute lie. He knows it. Everyone knows it,” Schumer wrote. “Only one man can restart the project and he can restart it with the snap of his fingers.”
As of Tuesday night, Schumer has not yet responded to Leavitt’s claims online. The Independent has contacted the New York senator’s office for comment.
Trump froze $200 million in federal funding for the project, the Gateway Tunnel Project in New York City, in October, even though the funds had already been approved by Congress.
Work on the tunnel, which would join New York and New Jersey and ultimately replace other aging infrastructure linking the states, now cannot continue due to Trump’s refusal to unfreeze the federal funding.
The Gateway Development Commission, which is overseeing the project, sued the federal government over the funding freeze last week. Judge Jeannette Vargas in Manhattan ruled against the Trump administration and ordered it to release the funding on Friday, the same day as Trump made his comments about Schumer.
But soon after, the Department for Transport applied for a temporary restraining order against the ruling while it appealed, arguing that there would be no “obvious mechanism” for recovering the money if it was forced to do so. Work on the project had not been restarted as of Tuesday and a hearing is set for Wednesday to determine the next steps.
The Independent has contacted the White House and the Department of Transport for comment.
The Trump administration never offered any specific reason for why it froze the funds and blamed Democrats for refusing to negotiate to get the project restarted.
New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill hit out at the administration’s delays.
“I took the president to court on Friday, and I won. The court demanded release that money, and he has yet to do so,” Sherrill said Monday, per CBS. “Here we are, all this equipment waiting to be put to work, all of you not on the job, because the president of the United States cares more about politics than he does about working men and women in this country.”
Sherrill said that delays to the New Jersey Transit system were tied to her funding demands.
Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York also reacted angrily to the reported naming deal in a post on X.
“These naming rights aren’t tradable as part of any negotiations, and neither is the dignity of New Yorkers,” Gillibrand wrote. “I demand that the president put people first and unfreeze this project and all the others his administration has been holding hostage for his personal gain.”
