Former U.S. president Donald Trump speaks in support of candidates Doug Mastriano and Mehmet Oz during a rally in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, September 3, 2022.
Andrew Kelly | Reuters
Former President Donald Trump on Friday shared the broad strokes of an ambitious plan to construct 10 latest “Freedom Cities” and beat China in the event of flying cars.
Lamenting that the U.S. has “lost its boldness,” the highest Republican 2024 presidential candidate called for a national contest to design the cities as a option to spur a “quantum leap within the American Standard of Living.”
One other plank of Trump’s plan, detailed in a less-than-four-minute video shared by his campaign, is for the federal government to spice up investment in flying personal vehicles.
“I need to be certain that America, not China, leads this revolution in air mobility,” Trump said within the video.
The policy-light plan sketched a vision of America’s future that was in some ways paying homage to “The Jetsons,” the classic cartoon depicting a high-tech utopian society where commuters traveled to work by flying automotive.
Efforts to construct electric vertical takeoff and landing vehicles, or eVTOLs, are already well underway — though flying taxis and aerial highways aren’t expected anytime soon, with automakers still understanding self-driving technology for land-locked cars.
In a press release, Trump’s campaign asserted that 10 cities the scale of Washington, D.C., could possibly be built using lower than one tenth of 1 percent of the lots of of million of acres of “empty” government-owned land. That land wouldn’t be a part of U.S. national parks, the campaign noted.
While Trump puts home- and car-ownership at the middle of his vision for an excellent American future, urban planners and politicians have increasingly championed urban infrastructure concepts that increase density and reduce reliance on cars.
Trump’s video also teased a “major initiative” to lower the associated fee of living, with a deal with lowering the prices of shopping for a automotive constructing a single-family home.
And he called for Congress to approve “baby bonuses” for young parents, a proposal that appears just like Democrat-proposed “baby bonds” laws that may give every child $1,000 a month.
The “Quantum Leap” plan follows other policy announcements from Trump’s 2024 campaign. Days earlier, Trump unveiled a protectionist trade agenda featuring “universal” tariffs aimed to encourage domestic production.
The most recent plan got here at some point before Trump is about to handle the Conservative Political Motion Conference.
