Even if Donald Trump does not run for president again in 2024 (and even if Democrats stop him from doing so), we’ll still be living with the consequences of his actions for years, decades, maybe generations. But some are more destructive than others. In a new interview with The Daily Beast, Stephen Marche, author of The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future, detailed a “genuinely insane” decision he made while in office that could end with one of the planet’s biggest cities devastated.
Marche pointed to a move his administration made in February of 2020, when they abruptly halted a project to erect a seawall around New York City to protect it from dangerous storms, such as Hurricane Sandy in 2012 or Ida over the summer. At the time, Trump mocked the plan, which would have cost billions of dollars, on Twitter, less than a year before he was booted from the platform.
Back then, The New York Times reported that, while Trump “cannot single-handedly cancel a Corps project,” the “unusual” cancelling of the project led to suspicion that politics had played a hand.
While speaking to The Daily Beast, Marche claimed that another major storm, like Sandy, would not be good for the nation’s most densely populated city.
‘The models when a hurricane hits New York are incredibly strong, ” he said. “Miami and New Orleans are very nice towns, but New York is New York and 88 percent of the world’s international currency goes through, it’s still the capital of the world really.” He added that NYC is “also unrebuildable,” saying, “When it floods, the density of the infrastructure is so thick that, unlike Miami or Houston or New Orleans, they won’t won’t be able to rebuild it.”
Both Marche and reporter Molly Jong-Fast agreed that the decision to end that project was “genuinely insane.” So, thanks again, Trump!
(Via The Daily Beast)