Another Trump Failure: Infrastructure

Another Trump Failure: Infrastructure

The president’s latest proposal does nothing to change the fact that he has failed to deliver on the American people’s top priority.

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Each week we cross-post an excerpt from Katrina vanden Heuvel’s column at the WashingtonPost.com. Read the full text of Katrina’s column here.

President Trump’s address to Congress last Tuesday was predictably loaded with falsehoods and malice. Between dissembling on the economy and vilifying immigrants, however, Trump did make room for one conspicuous show of bipartisanship. “I am asking both parties to come together to give us the safe, fast, reliable and modern infrastructure our economy needs and our people deserve,” he said.

Trump has been promising to rebuild the nation’s dangerously outdated infrastructure for nearly three years now. “We’re becoming a Third World country,” he declared during his campaign announcement, “because of our infrastructure.” During his inaugural address, Trump bemoaned that “America’s infrastructure has fallen into disrepair and decay,” pledging to “build new roads, and highways, and bridges, and airports, and tunnels, and railways all across our wonderful nation.” As of last week’s State of the Union, the new infrastructure, like Trump’s name on the facade of a skyscraper, will be “gleaming.”

The problem is that Trump has failed to put forward anything that remotely resembles a credible plan. Instead, he’s attempting to pass off a privatization scheme as a public-works project.

Read the full text of Katrina’s column here.

We cannot back down

We now confront a second Trump presidency.

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Armed with a remarkable 160 years of bold, independent journalism, our mandate today remains the same as when abolitionists first founded The Nation—to uphold the principles of democracy and freedom, serve as a beacon through the darkest days of resistance, and to envision and struggle for a brighter future.

The day is dark, the forces arrayed are tenacious, but as the late Nation editorial board member Toni Morrison wrote “No! This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.”

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Onwards,

Katrina vanden Heuvel
Editorial Director and Publisher, The Nation

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