Close To 100K People Sign Petition To Rename Street Outside Trump Tower To ‘President Barack H. Obama Avenue’
Close to 100,000 people have signed on to a petition that would rename the street outside Trump Tower in Manhattan after one of Donald Trump’s political rivals.
The MoveOn.org petition requests that a stretch of Fifth Avenue between 56th and 57th streets in Manhattan to be renamed to “President Barack H. Obama Avenue.” That would mean any addresses on that stretch of Fifth Avenue would be changed accordingly, the petition noted — including Trump Tower. The petition appears to be aimed at irking Donald Trump, who has for years reportedly launched attacks against Barack Obama, dating back to the early days of the first black president in American history’s initial term in office.
Trump was one of the key figures pushing “birtherism,” the theory claiming that Barack Obama was born in Kenya and was allegedly lying about his birth certificate. The idea has been widely decried as racist and was repeatedly discredited, including by Obama himself who responded to a public campaign from Donald Trump to question his citizenship by releasing his full birth certificate.
Some reports claimed that Trump still harbored beliefs that Obama was born outside the United States, even after Trump publicly denounced the theory while running for president in 2016.
The theory did not sit well with Michelle Obama, who wrote in her memoir Becoming that the conspiracy theory was personally painful for her family.
“The whole [birther] thing was crazy and mean-spirited, of course, its underlying bigotry and xenophobia hardly concealed,” she wrote, via Newsweek. “But it was also dangerous, deliberately meant to stir up the wingnuts and kooks. What if someone with an unstable mind loaded a gun and drove to Washington? What if that person went looking for our girls? Donald Trump, with his loud and reckless innuendos, was putting my family’s safety at risk. And for this I’d never forgive.”
Donald Trump has reportedly continued to criticize Obama now more than two years after Obama left office, regularly launching into tirades against Obama on Twitter, including accusations that Obama spied on his presidential campaign.
Over 85,000 sign petition to rename street by Trump Tower after Obama.
If the request is granted, Trump Tower's new address would be 725 President Barack H. Obama Ave. https://t.co/W5ncEYPfpC pic.twitter.com/ZsnQFNvFia
— PIX11 News (@PIX11News) August 14, 2019
Trump Tower and Donald Trump’s other high-profile properties have been the target for some creative protests from some of the president’s critics in the past. After Trump referred to some African and South American nations as “sh**hole” countries in a 2018 cabinet meeting, a protester used a giant projector to display the words “This is a Sh**hole” onto the side of the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C.
