He may only be just recovering from a routing at the midterms, but Donald Trump has already set his sights on a huge new building project.
The US president has long relished a major infrastructure project or shiny new building, from his new White House ballroom to the Trump ‘Arc de Triomph’ planned in Washington.
His latest wish, however, is a world-beating air show to rival existing set-piece annual events in Paris and Dubai.
Capeweek, as it is to be known, will be first held in two years from now at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, Trump announced on Friday.
The president said it had been 30 years since a new airliner was unveiled at an airshow on American soil, with manufacturers including Boeing typically choosing large-scale events overseas to showcase their latest models.
In his address, Trump claimed that the foreign hosts of airshows ‘do not dominate aviation’-despite Airbus, which has major production facilities in France, surpassing Boeing in 2019 as the world’s largest aerospace corporation by commercial deliveries and brand value.
Pledging the world’s biggest aviation event, the president said: ‘But those foreign countries do not dominate aviation and they don’t dominate aerospace. They don’t come close, actually, we do.
‘And under the Trump administration, we believe that the future of those industries should be unveiled right here in the USA. We dominate and we should have the biggest show.
‘We will have within two years, the biggest airshow. That means commercial. That means space, that means everything… in the world by far. It won’t even be close.’
He added the upcoming show would be ‘bigger, better and grander’ than its Parisian counterpart, promising a spectacle ‘the likes of which has never been done before’.
The president even alluded to British-French supersonic airliner, the Concorde, which he billed ‘one of the most beautiful pieces of art I’ve ever seen’ but adding that things had gone ‘backward’ since the bird was retired in 2003.
Addressing this week’s elections, in which Democrats took control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate, Trump claimed the results had cost the US economy $3 trillion, while insisting they did not represent a verdict on his presidency.
‘By the way, I was not on the ballot, just in case you had any question. Because if we were on the ballot, we would have won, but we weren’t’, he said.
Provisional results show the Democrats are on 55 of 100 senate seats and 251 house seats, with several results, including two senate seats still to be called.
The elections saw traditionally red states including Texas and Kansas turn blue for the first time in decades, the latter returning its first Democratic senator in nearly 100 years.
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