Amazon HQ2 withdrawal ‘a big loss for New York City’

Mandel Ngan | AFP | Getty Images

President Donald Trump speaks during a meeting with Chinese Vice Premier Liu He in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC, on February 22, 2019.

Uncharacteristically taking the same side as Amazon, President Donald Trump called the company’s decision to abandon it’s HQ2 plans in Queens “a big loss for New York City.”

Trump, who is known to bash Amazon and its founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, mocking him as “Jeff Bozo” in one tweet, made the case for Amazon during a press conference in the Oval Office Friday. But on Friday, Trump defended the nearly three billion in tax incentives the city and state offered Amazon for its promise of 25,000 high-paying jobs in a deal brokered by the Democratic governor and mayor.

“The three billion dollars wasn’t a check, it was a form of taxes over a period of time that now they’ll never see because they were going to take in a lot of jobs, they were going to take in a lot of taxes,” Trump said.

His perspective lines up with his own experience as a real estate magnate in New York City. Trump argued that while the New York officials “could have made a better deal” with Amazon, the company’s decision to reverse course was ultimately bad for the economy and emblematic of liberal leadership.

“It’s the kind of thinking that our country is going to on the left, on the radical left, but ultimately it’s not good for jobs and it’s not good for the economy,” Trump said.

That comment may be a hint at some of Trump’s biggest critics, like Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who played a key role in squandering New York’s deal with Amazon. Ocasio-Cortez, who represents an area near the Long Island City region where Amazon was planning its new office, praised the company’s retreat as a victory.

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“Anything is possible:” Ocasio-Cortez tweeted the day Amazon reversed its plans, “today was the day a group of dedicated, everyday New Yorkers & their neighbors defeated Amazon’s corporate greed, its worker exploitation, and the power of the richest man in the world.”

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