You can’t name Penn Station after Donald Trump. You can’t even joke about it.
New York Governor Kathy Hochul
(Selcuk Acar / Anadolu via Getty Images)
Yes, New York Governor Kathy Hochul is already backtracking.
Embroiled in various public transportation battles with disgraced, twice-impeached President Donald Trump, Hochul recently offered one way to win his support to complete renovations on storied Penn Station: to name it after him.
“If he puts $7 billion into it? Who knows?” the governor told reporters on Friday. “It would not be my favorite thing to call it, but it’ll save us $1.3 billion I’m not planning to spend.”
New York might name the revival of a once glorious palace of train travel that turned into a hellhole for commuters 60 years ago, after the type of man who supported the policies and the attitudes that made it a hellhole? Also, a man convicted of 34 felonies in our state, sued for business fraud by New York Attorney General Leticia James and ordered to pay hundreds of millions, and ordered to pay a New York resident, E. Jean Carroll, $88 million for assaulting and defaming her? (Trump is appealing both those last judgments.)
Put his name on anything but Rikers Island, Governor, and I’ll sit out your election. Seriously. I would not travel from Carlo Gambino’s Grand Central Station, or Lucky Luciano’s LaGuardia Airport. Or Luigi Mangione’s Newark Station. C’mon.
I know, I know: People like Hochul have to deal with Trump, in some way. That’s how someone I truly admire, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, wound up infamously holding a blue binder over her face when she wound up in the Oval Office. These blue/purple state governors (yes, New York is a purple state when you look at the red land mass; blue New York only comes out when well organized, which Hochul did not do in 2022) believe they have to work with Trump for the sake of their states. Maybe they’re right. But they don’t have to bow down to him like this.
Over decades, New Yorkers finally got Daniel Patrick Moynihan Hall, which is lovely. But the “old” Penn Station, which is mainly where daily commuters lurk, remains unrenovated and unlovely. Some of the restaurants down there got a facelift, but the ceilings are entirely too low and it still shrieks 1966. (Part of me doesn’t mind; this is the Penn Station I grew up with!) New York’s commuters deserve better.
I applaud Hochul’s perseverance with the entire project, not just the more lucrative Amtrak part of the station, which for its part will benefit travelers up and down the East Coast lines. But don’t even joke about putting Donald Trump’s name on what you do with it.
Remember how places across the country had to remove the Sackler name from their institutions, once it became associated with peddling opioids to vulnerable people, and killing thousands? The Trump name will go down in history as much worse than Sackler.
Donald Trump is sweeping legal US residents, and even citizens, out of the country, often to cruel detention centers. He has already killed an uncountable number of people in foreign countries with his aid cuts. He will kill an eventually countable number of Americans with his medical research cuts. He is not a leader that legitimate government leaders should take seriously, except to repudiate him.
Don’t even kid about this, Governor. It’s not funny.
The chaos and cruelty of the Trump administration reaches new lows each week.
Trump’s catastrophic “Liberation Day” has wreaked havoc on the world economy and set up yet another constitutional crisis at home. Plainclothes officers continue to abduct university students off the streets. So-called “enemy aliens” are flown abroad to a mega prison against the orders of the courts. And Signalgate promises to be the first of many incompetence scandals that expose the brutal violence at the core of the American empire.
At a time when elite universities, powerful law firms, and influential media outlets are capitulating to Trump’s intimidation, The Nation is more determined than ever before to hold the powerful to account.
In just the last month, we’ve published reporting on how Trump outsources his mass deportation agenda to other countries, exposed the administration’s appeal to obscure laws to carry out its repressive agenda, and amplified the voices of brave student activists targeted by universities.
We also continue to tell the stories of those who fight back against Trump and Musk, whether on the streets in growing protest movements, in town halls across the country, or in critical state elections—like Wisconsin’s recent state Supreme Court race—that provide a model for resisting Trumpism and prove that Musk can’t buy our democracy.
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In solidarity,
The Editors
The Nation
