Leavitt Contradicts Trump on Effort to Rename Penn Station After Him
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt contracted President Trump on Tuesday, saying it was Trump who floated the idea of putting his own name on New York’s Penn Station and Washington, D.C.’s Dulles Airport during a conversation with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.
“About renaming, why not? It is something the President floated in his conversation with Chuck Schumer,” Leavitt said.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]That’s not how Trump described the conversation four days earlier. On Friday, Trump insisted it was Schumer who had suggested renaming Penn Station to Trump Station as part of a deal to unfreeze federal funding for the $16 billion Gateway rail tunnel project, which would add another commuter tunnel between New Jersey and Manhattan.
“Chuck Schumer suggested that to me about changing the name of Penn Station to Trump Station,” Trump told reporters on Air Force One. “Dulles Airport is really separate. Dulles Airport is really not too involved with Congress. That’s a separate kind of a deal, as you know.”
Schumer posted on X last week that Trump’s version of their conversation was an “Absolute lie.”
Trump has already put his name on the facade of the largely-gutted U.S. Institute of Peace, and added his last name to the Kennedy Center’s exterior before shuttering it for two years for a construction project.
Trump froze the funding for the Gateway Tunnel last year, during the government shutdown. A federal judge has given the Trump administration until Feb. 12 at 5 pm to resume payments for the project or to appeal the decision to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. U.S. District Judge Jeannette Vargas said the states of New York and New Jersey have shown that the federal funding shutdown will have an “immediate and severe” impact and that substantial delays could lead to the loss of up to 95,000 jobs. The project is intended to build a new rail tunnel into Manhattan and renovate the existing 110-year-old tunnel under the Hudson River.