A Staten Island lawmaker suggested that since the president is very popular in his borough that the Trump Presidential Library should be built on the Island.
By: Rusty Gordon
City Council Member Joe Borelli urged that the Queens-born president this month to build his presidential library on Staten Island instead of Manhattan, where Trump has lived and done business for much of his adult life, Patch reported.
“There are a fair amount of people that appreciate what he is doing as president, and I think that would probably make the transition easier to locate the library here versus somewhere else,” Borelli, a Republican representing Staten Island’s South Shore, said in a phone interview to Patch.
Trump likely would have an easier time siting his library in a place where he has plenty of political support than in a deep-blue borough where “progressive” residents would fight it “tooth and nail,” Borelli wrote in a Sept. 20 letter to the White House.
“I believe you have a certain affection for our borough and its residents, and I believe that in many ways, it is shared,” Borelli wrote in his letter, which noted Trump’s childhood visits to his father’s Staten Island buildings. The New York Post first reported on the lawmaker’s letter.
Trump has suggested building the library in Florida in previous statements.
As a kid, Trump visited dad Fred Trump’s Grymes Hill Apartments and Tysens Park Apartments complexes, emptying money from laundry machines and doing other odd jobs, according to the Staten Island Advance.
“In the summers I used to work on Staten Island,” the president recalled at fundraiser in the borough last year. “The greatest people. These people are incredible people.”
Trump could develop his future library on some of the vacant waterfront land along the island’s north and west shores, Borelli argued, noting the city recently rezoned a stretch of Bay Street near the Staten Island Ferry terminal.
“There really isn’t a deeper rational argument against it beyond, ‘Orange man bad,'” Borelli said in an interview with Patch. “Orange man bad” has become a popular phrase in the political world online referring to Trump’s detractors who vehemently detest the president without any specific reason.
Most lawmakers in NYC have been hostile to the president from his first day in office. especially in Manhattan. Many refuse to even mildly show the office any respect, particularly de Blasio, who decided to run for president, neglecting the city for months to campaign in a bid that was a failure from the first day.
Staten Island was the only borough in the city that heavily voted for Trump in 2016, where 57% of Staten Islanders voted for the president.
Trump’s library would be the second to open in New York State. Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s library and museum at his family home in upstate Hyde Park became the nation’s first presidential library in 1941, Patch explained.
