President Trump touted his skills as a builder on Thursday in a speech the White House had billed as a promotion of his administration’s infrastructure plan, which has failed to gain traction in Congress despite Trump’s repeated attempts to kick-start a legislative push for the proposal.
“I was always very good at building. It was always my best thing. I think better than being president, I was maybe good at building,” Trump said during a wide-ranging speech in Richfield, Ohio, on Thursday.
Trump vowed to harness his building experience to construct his promised border wall and complete many other infrastructure projects “on time and under budget,” a phrase he has often repeated in connection to the wall.
“We’re getting that sucker built,” Trump said of the wall, for which the administration recently secured $1.6 billion in funding.
But Trump seemed to push back the timeline for the completion of his infrastructure plan, which White House aides once hoped to pass during his first year in office. Trump noted Congress might not pass the plan until after the midterm election in November.
The president boasted of the support his campaign enjoyed among union workers in 2016, despite the efforts of labor leaders to encourage support for Democrats.
“We didn’t always get the union leadership. But we got the workers. We got the workers. Some of the leaders had big problems, because the workers were with Trump,” he said. “Because they know I hired the teamsters. Thousands of teamsters. 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. And they got it. The workers got it.”
Lamenting the deterioration of roads and bridges across the U.S., Trump called on workers to reclaim their “heritage” of construction and innovation that built American infrastructure initially.
“Now, we are like, in many cases, a third world country,” Trump said.
Trump said Congress could fold his infrastructure priorities into one piece of legislation or pass them in separate, smaller bills — as long as they moved to enact his plan.
“It can be passed in one bill, or in a series of measures. What matters, is that we get the job done,” Trump said.
The four-pillared plan, Trump noted, would involve investing in job training and education for workers, streamlining the permitting process for prospective builders, committing 50 billion to developing rural communities, and forging “smart state and local partnerships” to stretch federal dollars further.
The rural infrastructure investment would include efforts to connect isolated communities with broadband access, Trump said.
“The first elements of this plan have already been put into place,” he added, noting that he signed executive orders related to permitting and rural broadband access.
Trump’s speech also touched on subjects ranging from guns to Syria to his recent decision to replace Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin with the White House physician, Ronny Jackson.
