I had somehow missed this:
Trump said in multiple campaign videos that he would spearhead an effort to build Freedom Cities to “reopen the frontier, reignite American imagination, and give hundreds of thousands of young people and other people, all hardworking families, a new shot at home ownership and in fact, the American Dream.”
In his plan, the federal government would charter 10 new cities on federal land, awarding them to areas with the best development proposals. The former president said in a campaign video that the Freedom Cities would bring the return of US manufacturing, economic opportunity, new industries and affordable living.
In the March video, Trump added that the US under a second Trump administration would lead in efforts to “develop vertical-takeoff-and-landing vehicles for families and individuals,” not letting China lead “this revolution in air mobility.” The former president said these airborne vehicles would change commerce and bring wealth into rural communities.
I don’t even know where to fucking start…
Who would pay for it? Who would live there? How long does he think it would take to populate them? Does he think bubba is just gonna up and sell his doublewide in Shinnston and move to Trumptown, Texas? How would they be governed? Would they have to follow state building regulations? Is he just building the infrastructure (roads, electricity, water, sewage, natural gas), and then people would build the rest?
Cocaine is a helluva fucking drug.
Baud
Meet George Jetson…
Frankensteinbeck
And they’ll all be built during infrastructure week!
OzarkHillbilly
Looney Toons.
MagdaInBlack
John, you keep using that word “think” as if it’s something he actually does.
Baud
See… This is how you campaign to Biden’s left.
CaseyL
This would be forgotten before he took the oath of office (itself a huge joke: how do you administer an oath to someone who has not only shattered it into a zillion pieces already, but has built a campaign around pissing on the pieces?
Or, if not forgotten outright, just another way to funnel tax money to himself and his friends. Oh, and also an excuse to open federal land to resource extraction.
Not a single habitable structure would ever be built.
lollipopguild
TFG is also going to move all of the homeless people in the country out of the cities to Gov run camps in wilderness areas/govt land out west. Blink once and no more homeless people!
Elizabelle
And Mexico is going to build them!
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@lollipopguild:
What happens when state governments refuse to comply in this hypothetical?
HumboldtBlue
I want my goddamn VSTOL and I want it now!
Baud
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
Nothing, because this is all fantasy.
MattF
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): Sue.
Matt McIrvin
TRUMPCOT! The Totalitarian RUMP Community Of Tomorrow!
lollipopguild
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): I think that his idea is that the camps will be built on Federal land plus think of all of the JOBS! Tfg does not think anything thru. He does not need to , his cult worshipers will think he is the smartest person ever!
chopper
“for families and individuals” so if you’re just dating, no flying cars for you
Chris Johnson
@Baud: Being thrown out of a helicopter does NOT count as vertical landing…
chopper
@lollipopguild:
he wants to get his beak wet with all the building contracts
Matt McIrvin
It’s Trumposanti, a megatrumpture arcology that makes ceramic bells shaped like Ivanka’s ass!
MagdaInBlack
@Baud: Exactly.
Geminid
Trump might have gotten this cockamamie idea from Saudi Crown Prince bin Salman’s Neom project. That’s to be a humongous planned city in northwest Saudi Arabia, including a port on the Red Sea. Neom is probably bigger than what Trump “envisions;” one building is supposed to be 200 meters wide and over 80 miles long.
Another difference between the two projects is that Neom might get built.
bbleh
Aw he doesn’t believe it and neither do any but the truly dumbest of his followers. He’s speaking in MAGA poetry. He’s evoking emotions, using codewords, defining boundaries that separate the Real Americans from the Others. He’s singing a song they love to hear and cheer, and that they occasionally play in their heads, but when the concert’s done they’ll go home.
And what’s really funny is, if you were to ask one of them about the specifics, they’d just get mad, because you don’t get it.
It’s a cult.
Van Buren
If you build it, they will come.
Also, I have a suspicion that Elon Musk will be getting the VSTOL contract.
Baud
@Geminid:
The Line City is wild.
RSA
Galt’s Gulch, Galt’s Glen, Galt’s Grotto, Galt’s Grove, Galt’s Glade, Galt’s Gulf, Galt’s Garrison… What could go wrong?
tokyokie
@Baud:
tfg isn’t campaigning to Biden’s left. He’s campaigning in another dimension of reality.
lollipopguild
@chopper: Plus his sons will want to get “paid”.
sab
@RSA: I am feeling very John Galt about paying income taxes in Ohio. I will do it but I will not like it.
Jay
@Elizabelle:
While Mexicans, Guatemalans and Hondurans will build them,
Mexico is not going to pay for them.
lollipopguild
@RSA: ALL of Galt’s men and women end up dying in VSTOL crashes.
Jay
@RSA:
Bears,……
Joseph Patrick Lurker
First, you defeat him in the 2024 Presidential election. Second, you convict him in the classified documents case or some other federal case which, hopefully will be brought against him, and then you place his motherfucking fat ass in a federal prison cell.
lollipopguild
Along with getting rid of all of the homeless TFG wants to build camps for all of his enemies(you know who you are). This will be the MAGA version of GEN. P from Chile.
SpaceUnit
The flying car is the worst idea anyone ever had.
Here’s an experiment. Go to a Walmart on a Saturday afternoon. Just walk around for a while and keep track of how many of the shoppers you’d actually trust to pilot a hurtling piece of machinery over your neighborhood while snarfing down a Slurpee, smoking a cigarette, yapping on their phone and yelling at their kids in the back seat. Not many.
ETA: Freedom Cities. Fuck me.
MattF
@tokyokie: See, you have to give up these outmoded models of political thought. If someone disagrees with you, they should just be eliminated.
Michael Bersin
@Joseph Patrick Lurker:
That would work.
Raoul Paste
The pie in the sky promises and (conversely) the apocalyptic dire warnings are just going to become more outlandish in the days ahead.
Which ones are from Trump, and which are AI generated? It may be hard to tell.
Baud
@Raoul Paste:
AI follows correct capitalization rules.
MattF
@Baud: So… Trump is a capitalist.
Juju
You roll your eyes, smirk a bit, do the crazy finger swirl thing and make sure you vote.
NotMax
“A hamberder in every pot and an Osprey in every garage.”
//
Matt McIrvin
@SpaceUnit: I think that if flying cars existed they would have to be entirely computer-piloted–no human controls allowed. And that would mean the software would probably have to be better than what currently exists, though flying may be easier for a computer than navigating a road.
The bigger problem is that this kind of hovering VTOL flight is just horrendously inefficient and probably hellishly noisy too.
NotMax
How Do You Deal With This Level of Crazy
Point and guffaw, man. Point and guffaw.
ETtheLibrarian
Cocaine is a hella drug especially when one’s brain is so old and possibly affected by venereal diseases.
Jackie
“…the Freedom Cities would bring the return of US manufacturing, economic opportunity, new industries…”
Biden’s doing this RIGHT NOW in EXISTING towns and cities. It’s got to stick in TIFG’s craw so bad!
SpaceUnit
@Matt McIrvin:
It just wouldn’t be workable in densely populated areas. There would be carnage. Maybe out in the boonies.
ian
@Geminid:
There is a lot that I am trying to wrap my mind around here, not the least of which is the conversion between imperial and metric :)
ColoradoGuy
Ayn Rand + LSD = Freedom Cities
Another Scott
I think you’re reading this all wrong.
He wants to put his name in gold paint over the gate to the development. He wants his vig. He has no interest in actually building any of this stuff – he’s selling the sizzle, not the steak.
“You just tell them and they believe it – they just do.”
It’s a grift.
That is all.
Cheers,
Scott.
hells littlest angel
I hear that Spacely Sprockets is eager to build some new factories in these new Freedom Towns.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Joseph Patrick Lurker: And take away his cell phone
NotMax
OT.
While hardly qualifying as a connoisseur, I do like vodka and occasionallty step further than my usual choices of brands for experimentation.
Ran across a tremendously inviting sale on this (new to me) stuff and took a gamble.
Some find vodkas harsh or sharp. Gotta say that while it may not be what a tavern would deem top shelf, it is absitively posolutely the smoothest drinking brand I’ve ever downed. Still a standard 80 proof, what punch it harbors gently sneaks up on you after imbibing.
Suzanne
I mean, if this was even sort of real, it would be awesome for me. I’d have a years-long backlog of work. But it’s, of course, but more word salad.
Ohio Mom
He’s a gambler doubling down in desperation.
I know nothing about gambling, does that ever work? I’m guessing not.
Ken
The second generation of quarks matches Biden/Trump pretty well: charm and strange.
Ken
No, the exact opposite. If there were economic reasons for cities to exist in those locations, they already would.
trnc
Who would pay for it?
We would.
Who would live there?
No one.
How long does he think it would take to populate them?
Doesn’t matter, cuz it’s 100% a grift for the people who still send him money for, well, anything.
Does he think bubba is just gonna up and sell his doublewide in Shinnston and move to Trumptown, Texas? How would they be governed? Would they have to follow state building regulations? Is he just building the infrastructure (roads, electricity, water, sewage, natural gas), and then people would build the rest?
Ask his targets, who will give you any answer that makes sense to them, which would essentially be the logical equivalent of a Jackson Pollack. That’s the beauty of being a cult leader.
RepubAnon
@SpaceUnit: Drunk drivers doing roadshows in the air. Over my house. How… exciting.
NotMax
@Ken
Yellowstonia
Trumpcester
Yosemite City
Donald -on-the-Green
Kushner Acres
Ivankaton
Perfecta
Shilladelphia
Barron Center
Nocovidburg
//
“Pave paradise, put up a snarking lot.”
schrodingers_cat
This is still less delusional than BJP-Sangh’s pipe dream of Akhand Bharat. (Undivided Bharat) which contains not just Pakistan and W. Bengal but also Burma, Nepal, SriLanka and Afghanistan.
Jeffro
SEE, LIBS, WE TOLD YOU WE COULD “DO” POLICY!
lol
Folks this is just another variation on the trump/Bannon 1-page playbook, “Flood the zone with bullshit”
None of this noises is worth discussing.
What IS discussing is the eventual penalties trumpov’s gonna earn for inciting insurrection against the United States.
Turgidson
Let these dipshits go Galt. Biden should offer a similar proposal, but only available to people who voted for Cheeto Benito.
Suzanne
@trnc: It would be the urban equivalent of Pruitt-Igoe.
mrmoshpotato
Dump’s dumbass racist trash supporters would drain their bank accounts.
Russian mothers and their anchor babies! (Remember that about Dump’s shitbag condos?)
Yes.
Fascistically.
LMAO! Is this a joke?
Like the Soviet shitpile mobster conmanbaby would build anything!
Princess
It’s not delusional at all and it’s not entirely bullshit. It’s a scheme to funnel tax money to him and his cronies. He sees Netanyahu and his buddies making bank in the settlements throwing up shoddy buildings and he wants some of that action. The guy is corrupt as hell but he’s not stupid.
Juju
@NotMax: Trumpton Downs,
Melaniaopolis,
Markburgh,
Suckerbury, and Katbuttmouth
Thats all I have.
The Lodger
@Ken: Thank you for not mentioning top and bottom.
mrmoshpotato
@Princess: He’s a brilliant conman, but he’s also stupid. See – aftermath of sucking Soviet schlong in the White House.
RaflW
OK, from a practicality standpoint, it’s insane. But as a campaign tactic to his base, he’s offering an exciting, really uuuge vision for the future. Yeah, it’s a scaled up casino blockbuster boondoggle, X10. But unlike crabby DeStruggling who is just negative all the damn time, it’s (laughably) positive vision-spinning.
Trump is a conman that would make carnival barkers blush. But he knows what he’s doing, even when he doesn’t know what he’s saying. If you will.
Splitting Image
@NotMax:
Otisburg.
mrmoshpotato
@bbleh:
No cult! No cult! You’re the cult! You’re the cult! SAD!
RaflW
@hells littlest angel: Was on a shortish road trip recently. We drove past the Lordstown former GM assembly plant (peak employment was over 13,000 workers).
Saw a FOXCONN sign has gone up. Maybe a few dozen cars in the parking lot. Scott Walker may have gone big on that scam, but WI pols were far from alone in thinking a city could rise phoenix-like from a company with CON right in the name. [forehead slap dot uhuh].
artem1s
So it’s infrastructure week – again
mrmoshpotato
@ETtheLibrarian:
Possibly? Putin’s bitch has been a manwhore for decades.
RaflW
@NotMax: I think it’d be Novicovidburg.
azlib
Do you know how long it took Reston, VA to be fully developed as a so called “new town”? These were all the rage in the 60s. Reston was, of course, helped by its proximity to Dulles Airport. But it still took a long time to fully develop. It has a population of over 60K today. Here is an interesting link to its history: https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/reston-virginia/
Mai Naem mobileI
TFG will do something about this but not like the MAGAts think he will. This will be in Jared Kushner’s portfolio no doubt where he and his pals(Elmo,Thiel,Harlan Crow,Langone) will be shoveling a gazillion dollars from the US treasury either in cash or contracts.
randy khan
I’m kind of assuming the Freedom Cities will have mandatory gun ownership, starting around age 11, at least for boys.
hitchhiker
That reads just like something trump, stone, and bannon dreamed up while they were taking a break by the pool and looking at ladies.
It’s not supposed to be real. It’s supposed to make the cult giggle, make the media write stories, and make normal people roll their eyes.
Then the eye-rolling will become the subject of media stories about how elitists are smug and trump voters all get the joke.
I say we just skip to the next (and last) part, which is where everybody shrugs and acts like it wasn’t a thing.
Because it wasn’t.
Quaker in a Basement
@Matt McIrvin:
Way fewer pedestrians up there, yeah?
RaflW
@azlib: I’ve long had a weird curiosity to visit Milton Keynes in the U.K. Technically I guess it was a small village, but it was a planned New Town in the late 60s-70s. When I lived for a short time in London in ’88, Milton Keynes was a bit of a punching bag for humorists. It’s a city of 250,000 now.
Frankensteinbeck
You are all overthinking this.
He’s a braggart. This is bullshit of the purest form. He’s saying he’ll build something amazing. He has a real estate background, so that’s right up near the top of things he likes to talk about anyway.
This was like ten seconds of thought for Trump, tops. Mouth running on automatic.
Bupalos
China pretty much does this. What he means is worker barracks for some corporation he sold off public lands to.
Crazy shit like this is wide open for politicians like Trump. Just capitalizing on desperation. Sounds funny to folks who aren’t demoralized and desperate and maybe on drugs or barren religion. But America creates a lot of people who DO answer that description.
Ascap_scab
Yeah, flying cars! Promised since 1924! So stupid, even Elon Musk is grifting it.
https://www.popsci.com/cars/article/2010-10/archive-gallery-flying-cars/
LiminalOwl
@ColoradoGuy: Plus Robert Silverberg.
Ruckus
@tokyokie:
There is no reality in that lump of shit on top of that sand bag of a body.
Ruckus
@ETtheLibrarian:
Possibly is doing way, way too much work here.
sralloway
@Baud:
Damn. I have an earworm of the theme song.
NotMax
@sralloway
Jetson doorbell chime is the ringtone for my gets turned on every other blue moon cell phone.
Odie Hugh Manatee
Karenopolis
Cletusville
Whitesville
I bet there will also be blackjack and hookers!
NotMax
@Odie Hugh Manatee
Whitey McWhitetown?
Odie Hugh Manatee
@NotMax:
You can never be too white!
bjacques
MAGAgonny of course, because this isn’t the first time someone’s had this idea.
You can find the 1982 Sydney Opera production of Brecht and Weill’s “The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny” on YouTube. The city is founded by two thieves and a whore fleeing the law during the Alaska gold rush, and they set up in the desert (?) where their car has broken down, just outside of Pensacola. They advertise Mahagonny as a Paradise for malcontents everywhere, but it’s really a grift because it’s easier to mine gold from people than from rivers.
I’ve always loved Brecht’s creative approach to geography.
How Mahagonny was founded, as explained by the estimable Patti LuPone: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eOk7oKGhKh4&pp=ygUZSG93IG1haGFnb25ueSB3YXMgZm91bmRlZA%3D%3D
bjacques
And the only rule is kick or be kicked:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gOKAvSCSzFY&pp=ygUbbWFoYWdvbm55IG1ha2UgeW91ciBvd24gYmVk
Barney
It’s a fairly typical route for a megalomaniac right winger who’s had a bit of time on their hands. Mohammed Bone Saw’s “Neom”, as Geminid says above. Or Glenn Beck’s “Independence, USA“. These guys start to look at their doodles from records of boring production meetings, Presidential Daily Briefings etc. that they pick up while they’re on the john, and think “hey, I really had something there!” And suddenly, they’re the new Le Corbusier, and their dreams of flying cars and jetpacks all come flooding back. Trump reckons himself an expert on interior design, so this is just expanding out to the whole city.
Meanwhile, the acolytes encourage him, because if Trump ever got back in power, they’d make sure they got lucrative tax breaks and subsidies out of it.
(On Beck’s wheeze: “The concept was partly inspired by Galt’s Gultch, the utopian community in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, and by past initiatives proposed by Walt Disney. But unlike Disneyland, which Mr. Beck’s website describes as “commercialized,” Independence USA would be focused on community-living and sharing knowledge.” – Galt’s Gulch wasn’t exactly about “community-living and sharing knowledge” either, as far as I can tell. I thought its essence was to commercialize everything.)
Racer X
@Baud: It can happen here: https://www.jobyaviation.com/
Chris T.
@azlib: I used to work in Reston, in the 1980s between university semesters…
lowtechcyclist
I somehow overlooked this thread last night and earlier this morning. Sounds like a cool idea until you think about it for 10 seconds, which TFG’s fans won’t, because they barely think at all.
Cities form for reasons. Coastal cities tend to be (or have once been) good port locations, and a lot of cities are at the furthest point inland where you could sail an ocean-going vessel to before running into rocks and rapids. Atlanta grew as its natural location as a rail hub, just south of the southern end of the Appalachians, became important. Those locations created work to be done there, so people settled there to make a living doing that work. And as industries became a thing in the 19th century, factories didn’t just set themselves down in the middle of nowhere, their owners wanted labor nearby.
So you need jobs, local infrastructure, airports and highways connecting your businesses and their output to the wider world. Without jobs, all you can make is The Villages writ large. And without an already-existing labor force to draw on, there won’t be any jobs.
@Matt McIrvin:
Damn, there’s still someone else in the world who remembers all that Soleri stuff?
mwing
I have a sort of vague idea that planned cities- and in particular moving the nation’s capital to a planned city- it a recurring authoritarian government thing, I wonder if he’s sort of mentally riffing on that, but with minimal thought?