President Donald Trump called for a “great rebuilding” of America’s “crumbling infrastructure” in this State of the Union address Tuesday. But when Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) unveiled her Green New Deal infrastructure plan Thursday, Donald Trump Jr. zapped it as “socialism.”
A joint resolution by Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) outlined an ambitious “ten-year national mobilization” plan to build “smart grids” and boost power generated from the sun and wind to as close to 100 percent as possible over the next decade.
Donald Jr. scoffed at the inevitable failure of the idea that sounded to him like “socialism.”
Twitter users had a very different take. They wondered why he wasn’t counting taxpayer-funded corporate subsidies and tax breaks by the Trump administration as socialism, reminded him of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s nation-saving New Deal during the Depression — and pointed out how important publicly funded Social Security and Medicare are to Americans who aren’t billionaires.
Trump made the dig as he retweeted another post mocking the business failures of the Obama administration’s Green Energy Loan Program. Though Obama increased funding for the program, which helped Tesla, the program was actually started under President George W. Bush.