President Biden signed the long awaited Infrastructure bill today. There were even some Republicans in attendance. Retiring Senator Rob Portman even felt the need to thank Donald Trump for allegedly initiating the conversation. The truth is, he didn’t do a damn thing.
Here’s a reminder of how the crack Trump team went about it from June 2017:
President Trump this week began rolling out what he bills as a massive plan to rebuild America’s highways, bridges, railways and airports — but Sen. Thomas R. Carper (Del.) is nowhere to be seen so far.
Back in January, as one of the Democratic point men on infrastructure, Carper politely asked the new transportation secretary, Elaine Chao, if they could discuss what had been one of Trump’s top priorities from the 2016 presidential campaign.
“It took several months for that to happen,” Carper recalled Monday.
He praised Chao as someone “I like a lot,” blaming her chronically understaffed agency for being incapable of promptly scheduling the meeting. When she told him to speak to Gary Cohn, the president’s chief economic adviser, Carper got one phone call and then participated in an hour-long bipartisan meeting with Cohn a few weeks ago to discuss financing the plan.
“That’s pretty much the extent of it. It’s not the kind of fulsome outreach that one might have hoped for and expected,” said Carper, the top Democrat on the Environment and Public Works Committee.
In a different political orbit, Trump may have marked what the White House is calling “infrastructure week”with a signing ceremony for his first major bipartisan victory: making good on his pledge to drive $1 trillion into rebuilding the nation’s roads, bridges, airports and waterways. Trump regularly won begrudging plaudits from Democrats who saw the plan as something that would energize the economy.
And regardless of the hesitancy of party leaders on Capitol Hill toward big spending, the idea resonated with Republican voters who backed Trump all across the industrial Midwest and handed him the presidency. Those voters heard bridge-building and highway construction, and they saw new jobs for their once-thriving manufacturing regions.
In a different political orbit, Trump may have marked what the White House is calling “infrastructure week”with a signing ceremony for his first major bipartisan victory: making good on his pledge to drive $1 trillion into rebuilding the nation’s roads, bridges, airports and waterways. Trump regularly won begrudging plaudits from Democrats who saw the plan as something that would energize the economy.
And regardless of the hesitancy of party leaders on Capitol Hill toward big spending, the idea resonated with Republican voters who backed Trump all across the industrial Midwest and handed him the presidency. Those voters heard bridge-building and highway construction, and they saw new jobs for their once-thriving manufacturing regions.
It never got any better. Two years later the Democrats were still at the table when Trump came in a finally blew the whole thing up with a toddler temper tantrum:
President Trump abruptly blew up an infrastructure meeting with Democratic leaders at the White House on Wednesday and declared that bipartisan cooperation was impossible while House committees are investigating him, underscoring the increasing combustibility between two warring branches of government.
Trump refused to even sit down when he walked into the scheduled Cabinet Room meeting with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) and Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.). He then headed to a hastily called news conference in the Rose Garden.
Trump told reporters there that he gave the surprised Democratic leaders an ultimatum, warning that they needed to choose between pursuing infrastructure or their investigations of his finances, businesses and administration.
“You probably can’t go down two tracks,” he said. “You can go down the investigation track, or you can go down the investment track.
“I walked into the room and I told Sen. Schumer and Speaker Pelosi, ‘I want to do infrastructure. I want to do it more than you want to do it,’” said Trump.
“‘But you know what? You can’t do it under these circumstances. So get these phony investigations over with.’”
And that was that.
So sure, he talked about it. But he was too incompetent and too narcissistic to take yes for an answer. Of course, he blames Mitch:
He’s babbling incoherently there, as usual. But he’s also lying. The votes were there for an infrastructure bill all the way up until 2019. Democrats were terrified of voting against it and they almost certainly would have had the Manchin faction with them.
He blew up the talks because they were investigating him and tried to blackmail them into dropping the investigations.
The reality is that Trump not only didn’t pass anything significant during his tenure except the tax cuts for the rich because he didn’t understand or care about legislation. He wanted to throw his weight around with border walls and tariffs and executive orders. He just didn’t bother.