She came, they talked, he didn’t budge. That’s how President Trump described his Friday meeting at the White House with Gov. Hochul that centered on congestion pricing.
“It was a very cordial meeting and she brought me a brochure with data about the effect of the new tax,” Trump told me Saturday. “It’s something she thinks is good.”
By no means was he persuaded to back off his plan to kill the program by withdrawing the federal approval granted by the Biden administration. “I don’t see how I can back off,” Trump said. “The tax is devastating.”
“Of course traffic is down, nobody wants to go there and pay the price. Working people don’t make enough to add that kind of charge.” He cited the example of a repairman driving into Manhattan from an outer borough. “If a guy comes to fix your television, you think he can just add a traffic surcharge and people will pay it?”
Trump, showing he was well prepared for the meeting, said he raised the fact that the MTA loses much more money to fare and toll beaters than the $1 billion a year the congestion tax is supposed to raise. The agency says it has lost more than $5 billion to toll evasion on its bridges and tunnels in the last four years. In addition, it lost $800 million in fares last year alone when subway and bus riders refused to pay.
“Those numbers are astronomical,” Trump said he told Hochul. “If you let the police do their job, they can stop that. You feel like a sucker if you pay the fare,” he added. “This is so bad for New York. It’s so bad what they’re doing.” Why doesn’t Hochul understand that?
Cringe-worthy resistance
The obvious answer is that she is a member of the big spenders club and the resistance against Trump. Since the election, Democrats have been searching for a leader to rally around and causes to unite their dispirited troops. Some of the auditions have been cringe-worthy.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer led a rag-tag group chant of “We will win.”
Russia hoaxer and serial liar Sen. Adam Schiff hilariously warned that new FBI Director Kash Patel would use the agency for partisan purposes and Kamala Harris gave another speech that nobody understood. And now Hochul is joining the mob.
She might have been friendly during her private meeting with Trump, but publicly she attacks and mocks him. And the MTA, which she controls, is suing him.
It’s worse than a fool’s errand because the causes she is pushing aren’t even popular in deep-blue New York. In addition to the congestion tax, she is committed to protecting criminal migrants so Trump can’t deport them.
She apparently believes that’s her path to re-election next year even though just one-1 in-three 3 New Yorkers say they are likely to vote for her.
Strangest of all is Hochul’s model for her new approach: Rambo.
Yeah, she fancies herself a fictional movie hero.
Naturally, The New York Times sees the moment as a potential holy grail for leftists everywhere.
“Facing Trump’s Threats, New York’s Governor Adopts a ‘Rambo’ Attitude,” a front-page headline declared as the outlet cheered Hochul’s “more aggressive stance.”
It credited her with displaying “uncharacteristic drama and anger” and for invoking Sylvester Stallone films by saying Trump would pay for drawing “first blood.”
Desperate times call for desperate measures, but I’m betting Hochul’s Hollywood gambit is not going to have a long run on Broadway or anywhere else.
Kat’s ‘impersonation’
Rep. Ritchie Torres, a fellow Dem who is considering challenging Hochul next year, delivered a withering review of her speech, where she also vowed to sic new watchdogs on Mayor Adams lest he work too closely with Trump on the migrant crisis.
“There’s nothing remotely convincing about the governor’s impersonation of a strong leader,” Torres told me. “All the bellicose rhetoric about the president and the mayor rings as hollow as the governor herself.”
Ouch!
Hochul is embracing one of the dumbest ideas in circulation, which holds that Dems have a “messaging” problem that can be fixed with lawsuits and harsh criticism of Trump and Elon Musk.
It’s the kind of radical appeal that cost the party the election in the first place. Yet as March approaches, the Dems haven’t advocated a single new idea or agreed to work with Trump on anything. Their attacks on the DOGE Musketeers are a striking example of their foolishness.
At a time when most Americans view Washington as a swamp of corruption, resisting the effort to cut waste and fraud amounts to defending the indefensible.
Yet that’s where the Dems are, rushing to the barricades to defend every cent of the $7 trillion federal budget monstrosity, notwithstanding that $1.9 trillion of it is borrowed.
They shriek that any cuts in any program will end life as we know it.
I’ve long believed Trump is lucky in his opponents and that his knack for getting them to do and say really dumb things is a gift from the gods. His interactions with Hochul illustrate the point.
Despite the way New York prosecutors and courts tried to bankrupt and imprison him, the president’s love for his hometown endures.
As he did with the governor Friday, he’s often made clear his aim to help New York do big things, especially at Penn Station.
His main beefs are that the courts, as he knows firsthand, are corrupt and anti-business, and that the congestion tax is a job-killer.
Yet when his team withdrew federal approval for the tax, Hochul didn’t even consider the possibility he’s right. Instead, she denounced and mocked him.
She is also running ads touting the $9 daily tax for cars entering Midtown as proof of her devotion to New York.
Far-left heroism
She has it backward. Her pitch reflects a far-left version of heroism — raising taxes is always courageous precisely because it’s unpopular. That’s doubly dumb when a tax hike isn’t necessary. That’s the case here.
The combined budgets of the state, city and the MTA are nearly $400 billion this year.
Yet in Hochul’s view, that’s not enough, hence the $1 billion haul from the congestion tax.
Hochul stuck another stick in Trump’s eye, too.
Her calls for “guardrails” around the mayor are designed to make sure Adams doesn’t cooperate with Trump’s program of detaining and deporting migrant criminals.
Although the Justice Department wants to withdraw a Biden-era indictment of Adams, Hochul seems to believe the mayor’s biggest sin is that he met with Trump’s border bulldog, Tom Homan, and indicated a willingness to work with him despite city and state sanctuary policies.
That’s why she called for extra protections to stop the mayor from turning the city over to the Trump team. “We know they will stop at nothing to try and exercise control over New York,” she claimed.
How’s that for gratitude?
by Michae; Goodwin NYP
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