‘You Suck!’: Mayor De Blasio’s ‘Green New Deal’ Rally Inside Trump Tower Backfires Badly By Debra Heine
‘You Suck!’: Mayor De Blasio’s ‘Green New Deal’ Rally Inside Trump Tower Backfires Badly
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s bright idea to hold a Green New Deal rally inside the lobby of Trump Tower Monday, backfired badly when a crowd of Trump supporters showed up carrying signs that read “Worst Mayor Ever,” “Trump 2020, “Failed Mayor,” and “LGBT for Trump.”
The rally was supposed to be held outside, but due to inclement weather, the mayor had to go inside the Trump Tower lobby, which is considered a public space. The purpose of de Blasio’s rally was to promote his new Green New Deal, which seeks to reduce carbon emissions by 40 percent by 2030 according to Fox News.
De Blasio, who is mulling a Democratic presidential run in 2020, also took the opportunity to blast President Trump’s rollback of Obama-era environmental policies, and threaten his business with millions of dollars in fines if his buildings don’t comply with NYC’s new environmental standards.
But a group of raucous Trump supporters threw a monkey wrench in his plans, repeatedly going up and down the escalators waving their signs and jeering “you suck!”
Someone at Trump Tower also took the liberty of turning up the music in the lobby at the start of the rally, making it hard for de Blasio to be heard.
“His buildings are one of the biggest polluters in New York City,” said de Blasio. “Cut your emissions or we’ll cut something you really care about –“We’ll take your money.” But it was hard to hear him above all the noise.
After the rally concluded, De Blasio had to pass the Trump supporters on the way out of the building.
Pix11 News reporter Cristian Benavides said de Blasio’s “Green New Deal” rally inside Trump Tower ended up being “really bad optics” for hizzoner. The protesters at times chanted “so loudly the the mayor could barely be understood,” Benavides reported in the clip below.
But de Blasio didn’t seem to mind the protesters, quipping, “it’s so nice for them to serenade us.”
“They’re scared of the truth,” he said later. “Anyone that has a problem with saving the planet, I have a problem with them.”
Eric Trump blasted de Blasio’s actions as “simply childish” in a series or tweets a few hours after the press conference.
“The fact that the Mayor of a major city would attack an iconic organization (which employs thousands of hardworking New York taxpayers) for his own political gain is an abuse of power, unethical and simply counterintuitive,” Eric Trump wrote on Twitter.
Donald Trump Jr. didn’t comment on the debacle on Twitter, but he did retweet mega MAGA fan “The Persistence,” who posted a video of the protesters going up and down the escalators.
New York City’s Green New Deal plan was reportedly modeled after the one proposed in Congress by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y.
The City Council passed the legislation in a 45-2 vote last month, and de Blasio is expected to sign it soon, according to Fox News.
The deal is actually a package of 10 bills meant to curb carbon emissions in the country’s largest city by carrying out measures that will be “the equivalent of taking more than one million cars off the road by 2030,” according to New York City’s Committee for Environmental Protection Chair Costa Constantinides.
But the main facet of the deal is the plan clamp down on emissions from the city’s famed skyscrapers with a goal of reducing overall emissions by 40 percent by 2030. Buildings create almost 70 percent of the city’s greenhouse gas emissions, according to a recent survey.
“The first of any major city on the Earth to say to building owners, ‘you’ve got to clean up your act, you’ve got to retrofit, you’ve got to save energy,’” de Blasio said last month. “If you don’t do it by 2030 there will be serious fines, as high as $1 million or more for the biggest buildings.”
Upgrades to buildings in order to meet the new standards are expected to cost owners around $4 billion – a figure that has the city’s powerful real estate lobby up in arms.
“The bill that passed…will fall short of achieving the 40 x 30 reduction by only including half of the city’s building stock,” Real Estate Board of New York President John H. Banks said in a statement. “The approach taken today will have a negative impact on our ability to attract and retain a broad range of industries, including technology, media, finance, and life sciences, that provide opportunity and continued economic growth that is so important for our city.”
New York is not the only major American city to push its own version of the Green New Deal.
Another major American city mayor to be inspired by AOC’s Green News Deal is Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, who released a plan last month to make the city carbon neutral by 2050.
Comments are closed.
