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Donald Trump wants to throw America away and start over, and he wants you to pay for it [1]
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Date: 2023-03-03
As Politico reports, Donald Trump will release a video sometime on Friday in which he calls for a contest to build ten “Freedom Cities.” These are to be all new cities built “from the ground up,” with that ground being federal land donated to the project.
Trump wants these new cities to be serviced by vertical take off and landing aircraft (i.e. flying cars), and wants them to become “hives of industry” that will foster new industries (i.e. Spacely Sprockets and Cogswell Cogs). While Trump doesn’t seem to mention trains or anything else that would make a new city practical. Since most of the federal land Trump is talking about is in remote areas of western states with little existing access or infrastructure, it’s a good thing he’s talking about cities that wouldn’t need roads. Or water. Or any of that other old stuff.
What these cities do need is babies. Lots and lots of babies. Because Trump’ needs someone to date in 20 years, his idea for these Freedom Cities includes:
A population surge sparked by “baby bonuses” to encourage would-be-parents to get on with procreation.
Don’t think this means he’s about to support feeding, caring for, or educating those babies. He’s still a Republican, after all. He’s just proposing a cash payment to people who pop them out. In other words, Donald Trump wants to pay you to have kids for him,
Trump is describing all this in the most glowing terms as something that would “reopen the frontier” and “give hundreds of thousands of young people and other people” a shot at “the American Dream.” How those residents of Freedom Cities are to be selected is something of a mystery, but Republicans can certainly be counted on to come up with a few … standards.
But the biggest thing missing from Trump’s bin Salman envy is one simple point: America already has cities. America has a lot of cities. An estimated 83% of the American population already lives in urban areas; areas that are not currently bare, dry, unproductive, and poorly located federal land.
As you might expect, there’s nothing in this plan that involves improving conditions for the hundreds of millions of Americans who live in existing cities. Those cities have systematically been starved for infrastructure, education, and jobs by policies that have funneled vast wealth into the suburbs. Because the model for American governance, at both the federal and state level, often values land over people, Republicans have been able to use control of sparely populated rural areas to gleefully punish cities that are already hubs of innovation, already centers of industry, and already home to the majority of the population.
Instead, Trump’s plan boils down to the ultimate suburbs. It’s a scheme that treats the rest of America like a disposable cup that can be ditched in favor of something new, shiny, and only for the select few.
Someone will probably jump on the opportunity to design these Trumpvilles. Some of those designs may even be good. But then, it’s easy to make something look pretty and clean if you start by simply ignoring all the existing problems and all the damage that your new shiny thing will create.
Just like NEOM.
Yes, electing the president by popular vote is possible! Joining us on The Downballot is former Vermont legislator Christopher Pearson, an official with National Popular Vote, the organization advocating for states to adopt a compact that would award their electoral votes to the presidential candidate who gets the most votes nationwide. Pearson walks us through the mechanics of the compact, debunks some common misconceptions, and lays out future steps toward hitting the required 270 electoral votes for the agreement to come into force.
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