Trump Highway? Republican proposes new name for road running the length of Florida

A firebrand Florida Republican has re-upped his proposal to name the longest road in the state after former US President Donald Trump, arguing the gesture would cement his legacy as the establishment tries to “destroy” it.

Rep. Anthony Sabatini represents the 32nd district in the Florida House of Representatives, and hopes to challenge the incumbent Democrat Stephanie Murphy in the state’s 7th congressional district in 2022.

In a publicity stunt on Monday, he re-filed a proposal to rename US Highway 27 after Trump.

Sabatini had originally proposed the amendment in January, as Trump left the White House for his new home in Mar-a-Lago, but the initiative went nowhere. In the meantime, the Biden administration has systematically reversed most of Trump’s executive actions, clashing with Republican governors – such as Florida’s Ron DeSantis – on a range of issues, from immigration to Covid-19 measures. 

Insofar as it has been noticed at all, the proposal has mainly drawn crude comments from Democrats online.

Highway 27 runs from Fort Wayne, Indiana in the north to Miami in the south, passing through Kentucky, Tennessee and Georgia along the way. Most of its 481-mile (774 km) length in Florida is currently designated the Claude Pepper Memorial Highway, after a Democrat lawmaker who represented Florida in the US Senate (1936-1951) and the Miami area in the House (1963-1989). 

The final stretch of the road, from Lake Okeechobee to Miami, is named after Thomas Elmer Will, whose efforts to advocate for such a highway were more successful than his failed experiment with creating a planned community called Okeelanta.

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