President Joe Biden’s $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill nears certain passage in the Senate with the blessing of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), even though he strongly opposed a trillion-dollar spending program proposed by President Donald Trump in 2016.
“What I hope we will clearly avoid, and I’m confident we will, is a trillion-dollar stimulus,” McConnell said in December 2016 after Trump won the presidential election.
Trump campaigned on the idea of massive infrastructure spending, a proposal that McConnell was not eager to endorse.
“We need to do this carefully and correctly, and the issue of how to pay for it needs to be dealt with responsibly,” he said.
McConnell is now supporting Biden’s bill, which spends more money than Trump’s proposal.
Trump repeatedly tried to move forward on infrastructure, even meeting with Democrat leaders Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi in 2019 to outline a $2 trillion proposed deal.
Despite Trump’s enthusiasm, McConnell reportedly opposed the idea as leading Senate Republicans also expressed discomfort with the idea of deficit spending.
Now Trump continues excoriating the bipartisan infrastructure bill that Senate Republicans have put together with the Biden White House and Senate Democrats.
“Nobody will ever understand why Mitch McConnell allowed this non-infrastructure bill to be passed,” Trump wrote in a statement sent to reporters on Tuesday.
Trump expressed concerns that Republicans were working with Democrats even as they threatened to pass an additional $3.5 trillion entitlement bill that would roll back the 2017 tax cuts championed by McConnell.
“He is working so hard to give Biden a victory, now they’ll go for the big one, including the biggest tax increases in the history of our Country,” Trump wrote.
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