Infrastructure was supposed to be the great bipartisan hope, an issue on which Democrats would work with President Trump — except Trump no longer sounds so sure.
“I have asked Republicans and Democrats in Congress to come together and deliver the biggest and boldest infrastructure plan in the last half-century,” he said in his Richfield, Ohio speech on the subject late last week. “I don’t think you’re going to get Democrat support very much, and you’ll probably have to wait until after the election, which isn’t so long down the road.”
“The Administration will continue to reach out to Democrats on infrastructure as we know this is an issue that greatly concerns all Americans, regardless of their party affiliation,” a White House spokeswoman told the Washington Examiner. “The President was merely acknowledging that Democrats have been determined to prevent anything moving forward that could be perceived as a ‘win’ for him. Just look at the way they voted (or more accurately, didn’t vote) for tax reform, which is already putting more money in the pockets of hardworking Americans.”
[The curse of infrastructure week’]
Indeed, Trump thinks that could prevent any progress on the infrastructure initiative before the midterm elections. “Because the Democrats say, ‘Don’t give him any more wins. Don’t give him any more wins,’” he said on Thursday. “Regulations, cut taxes, Supreme Court, judges all over the place.”
When they released their infrastructure proposal in February, Trump administration officials expressed confidence bipartisan compromise was possible. When asked whether that would be obtained through seeking middle ground, funding more projects in Democratic districts, or picking off Trump state Democrats, an official told the Washington Examiner, “All of the above.”
Infrastructure was a rare Democratic olive branch after Trump’s upset win in the hard-fought 2016 presidential election. “As President-elect Trump indicated last night, investing in infrastructure is an important priority of his,” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said in a statement the next day. “We can work together to quickly pass a robust infrastructure jobs bill.”
“If Donald Trump comes up with an idea or a program which he campaigned on that says that our infrastructure is crumbling, that we can create millions of jobs rebuilding our infrastructure, that we’re going to put people back to work at decent wages, yeah, I will work with him,” Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., told reporters at a Christian Science Monitor breakfast.
“We think it should be large. He’s mentioned a trillion dollars, I told him that sounded good to me,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said of an infrastructure bill in a post-election interview with ABC News.
But Schumer accompanied that statement with a prescient warning. “We’re not going to oppose something simply because it has the name Trump on it, but we will certainly not sacrifice our principles just to get something done,” he said.
The Trump administration ultimately unveiled a plan to speed up the permitting process, provide special support for rural projects, increase spending on initiatives like the Transportation Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act Credit Program, and encourage states to come up with more reliable revenue sources for their own infrastructure projects.
Many Democrats balked, saying the direct federal spending — $200 billion — was too low to stimulate $1.5 trillion in new infrastructure investments. Once offsets were factored in, they argued the federal spending was just shuffled around. An administration official told reporters in February that the president was willing to negotiate on these numbers, but had a limit to how high he was willing to go.
Democrats have instead rallied behind a $1 trillion plan that funds new infrastructure projects in part by repealing the recent Republican-passed tax cuts, which makes it a nonstarter politically. “The dirt would be flying; we would be fixing highways and bridges; we would be funding water and sewer; we would be helping fixing city streets — all the things that Americans see as the basic role of government,” Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, told local media about his party’s proposal.
Trump had trouble staying on topic while selling his infrastructure plan last week, but when he talked about the plan he didn’t sound like he expected much more cooperation than he got from Democrats on Obamacare, judges, or taxes. But he tried to keep up the political pressure.
“We’re going to provide a $50 billion commitment to build infrastructure in rural communities, which are too often left behind. They’ve been forgotten,” Trump said. “They’ve been forgotten. We’re going to spend a lot of money on the rural communities that have not been taken care of. And these are incredible people. These are hardworking people. And they haven’t been taken care of by the Democrats.”
“Now the Democrats are trying to figure out who the hell you are,” he told the Ohio crowd. “You know who you are? You’re hardworking people. You work your asses off. And you got sick and tired of the people that you were supposed to be voting for, and you stopped. But you came out for us.”
Trump also talked about separating rank-and-file union members from their Democrat-supporting leaders. “We didn’t always get the union leadership of the big unions, but we got the workers,” he said.
“Some of those leaders had big problems because the workers were with Trump, because they know I hired the Teamsters — thousands of Teamsters — and I hired all of the carpenters, and the electricians, and all of the people that built a lot of buildings in Manhattan and all over the place,” Trump added. “And they got it — the workers got it. And now I think the leadership is actually getting it.”
This has been crucial to Republican chances. After former President Barack Obama won Ohio twice, Trump beat his Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton there by nearly 10 points. He eked out narrower wins in industrial states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin that hadn’t voted Republican since Ronald Reagan was president.
But Republicans recently lost a Pennsylvania congressional district that Trump carried by 20 points. While Trump has been a drag in some of the special elections and is contributing mightily to the headwinds his party will face in 2018 generally, GOP candidate Rick Saccone also underperformed with union households that voted for the president.
“We’re going to rebuild America’s crumbling infrastructure,” Trump vowed. But first he might need to rebuild a crumbling bipartisan consensus on the issue.
