Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) immediately feared that President Donald Trump would rack up huge legislative wins by working with Democrats to rebuild the country’s crumbling infrastructure. And Schumer was reportedly willing to put his partisan interests above the country’s to block Trump from winning.
“I know what you’re doing, and I’m not going to let it happen,” Schumer reportedly said to Trump’s chief strategist Steve Bannon in the early days of the administration, according to the afterward of Joshua Green’s new book, Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency.
As Axios’ Mike Allen pointed out, Schumer “was deeply worried that Bannon’s nationalism might fracture the Democratic coalition” and “feared Trump would begin by pursuing a $1 trillion infrastructure bill that would neatly align with Trump’s ‘builder’ image, produce tangible benefits, win over union voters Democrats rely on, and stand as a testament to what ‘America first nationalism’ could mean.”
Trump repeatedly spoke about improving the country’s infrastructure on the stump, talking about the nation’s crumbling roads and airports, and it helped him win over his crucial blue-collar voters in states like Pennsylvania.
A CNN/ORC poll found in March that a whopping 84 percent of Americans said they would “approve of a Trump administration budget proposal that reduces taxes for the middle class” while 79 percent said they supported “increased spending on infrastructure.”
But the clueless GOP establishment, for some reason, in addition to showing they had no plans to repeal and replace Obamacare despite campaigning incessantly for it for nearly a decade, instead focused narrowly on “privatizing the country’s air traffic control system. ”
“Despite Speaker Paul Ryan’s supportive public comments” and “whipping by House Transportation Chairman Bill Shuster, Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao and the FAA’s legislative affairs team, the bill won’t come up next week,” according to Politico’s Playbook, because “several lawmakers” reportedly said it “simply wasn’t a vote they wanted to take, because it gains them nothing back home.”
“In many cases local leaders are against the legislation. Roads are in disrepair, bridges are crumbling and no one really cares about modernizing air traffic control,” a lawmaker told Playbook’s trio.
Green told Axios this week that had Trump “pursued something like infrastructure instead [of health], he might’ve built a bipartisan populist coalition and tied pro-labor Democrats in knots.”
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