“Right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” Those words ring as true today as they did when the historian Thucydides recorded the sentiment 2,500 years ago.
President Donald Trump is reckless but strong. And the governor of what was once his home state, Kathy Hochul, is no Rambo.
That’s a big problem for New Yorkers, as the state announced this week that the first-in-the-nation congestion pricing program that began in Manhattan last month had already netted nearly $50 million to pay for the trains that are the circulatory system of the nation’s economic capital and densest big city. If that revenue goes away, the city would be left with a budget hole big enough to sink Central Park.
President Donald Trump is reckless but strong. And the governor of what was once his home state, Kathy Hochul, is no Rambo.
Days before these numbers were even released, the president announced on the Truth Social network he owns: “CONGESTION PRICING IS DEAD. Manhattan, and all of New York, is SAVED. LONG LIVE THE KING!” Trump is always testing weak spots, so it might not have been a coincidence that he posted his missive an hour before Mayor Eric Adams was in court for a hearing about the Trump Justice Department’s corrupt bid to drop its own criminal case against him — a move that’s led the governor to publicly flirt with using her power to fire the mayor.
Hochul pushed back immediately, and with uncharacteristic strength. “We are a nation of laws, not ruled by a king,” she wrote in a statement. “We’ll see you in court.” She held a fiery rally inside the congestion zone, declaring that she hadn’t been looking for a fight, but now “the bear’s been poked.” She even referred to Sylvester Stallone’s iconic character John Rambo: “Someone draws first blood, you respond.”
After Trump’s transportation secretary followed the president’s post with a letter not very credibly trying to officially justify what “the king” had already declared, the state-run Metropolitan Transportation Agency filed a lawsuit to block the feds’ attempt to retroactively take back its approval of a program that’s already up and running.
Indeed, the cameras enforcing the toll on all vehicles entering Manhattan anywhere from 60th Street to points south are still running. But it’s not clear how long the governor, and the toll, can hang on. Hochul went to the White House this weekend to make her case to Trump directly, with a slide presentation about how well the program’s doing.
He was, of course, unmoved. A day later, Trump told a columnist with the MAGA-friendly New York Post — which has led a crusade against New York’s plan to price roads, despite its being a model of the market-oriented ideas conservatives once embraced — that he couldn’t see backing off now. The paper quoted him delivering a decades-out-of-date spiel about how if “a guy comes to fix your television, you think he can just add a traffic surcharge and people will pay it?”
Hochul’s response to Trump’s trying to pull the plug was a rare moment of strength for an unintentional, unpopular weathervane governor facing serious primary and general election challenges next year. But it came awfully late in the game, after she’d abruptly paused the decades-in-the-making program just weeks before it was scheduled to start in June. That was nominally because the economic conditions weren’t right but obviously because she was afraid it would harm New York Democrats in congressional contests. After the election was over, the economic conditions hadn’t changed. But the political landscape had and, just like that, the plan was back on.
Hochul’s response to Trump’s trying to pull the plug was a rare moment of strength for an unintentional, unpopular weathervane governor.
When congestion pricing was finally born, it was seven months behind schedule, and its peak toll had been reduced to $9 from the planned $15, in a cut Hochul ridiculously tried to spin as putting money in New Yorkers’ pockets. Still, it almost immediately seemed to ease the borough’s traffic. Skeptical car drivers saw the results for themselves; bus drivers started pulling over because they were running ahead of schedule.
But that was just two weeks before Trump took office, and it’s far from clear that congestion pricing can survive his ire. Whatever the courts decide, there are many ways a president — and especially this president — can punish a state or a governor that won’t comply with his commands.
Millennia after Thucydides spun his wisdom — or nearly as long as it seemed to take for New York City to finally implement congestion pricing — the weak still suffer what they must. And a weak governor trying to keep an aging train system running means New Yorkers are also weak at a moment when Trump is stress-testing every possible limit on his power and his agenda.
