Another Day, Another Lie

Everyone knows that Donald Trump blew up at Pelosi and Schumer and immediately held an "impromptu" press conference in the Rose Garden laying into them for Pelosi's "cover up" remark.

How impromptu was it? There was a poster already prepared and printed handouts of talking points available in the seconds it took Trump to reach the podium.

“Instead of walking in happily to a meeting, I walk in to look at people who said I was doing a coverup,” Trump said, adding that he can’t work on infrastructure “under these circumstances.”

But that was actually the third story of the day. Earlier, the New York Times said "President Trump effectively blew up negotiations with Democratic leaders over a plan to rebuild the nation’s highways, airports and other infrastructure on Tuesday night, insisting that they put the idea aside until Congress approves a new trade pact with Mexico and Canada."

So it isn't the presidential harassment, it is the trade deal.

Except even earlier in the day, Politico reported "The White House is not going to present any plan to pay for rebuilding the nation’s roads and highways. Instead, the administration will ask Democrats to make the case for a $2 trillion package. The White House has identified roughly $1 trillion in spending cuts to pay for legislation — about as realistic a plan as saying this newsletter will fly you to the moon if you say abracadabra."

What is really happening? Trump once again made a big noisy proposal without checking with Mitch McConnell first. McConnell made it clear that he had no intention of spending a bunch of money on infrastructure, and it would have been a debacle if he’d sent an actual plan to Congress. On the other hand, he had promised infrastructure and Democrats were playing along. What to do?

So now we have three different excuses for ditching the infrastructure plan: Democrats are mean; Democrats need to figure out how to pay for it; and Democrats need to pass the trade deal first. Needless to say, all of these are made up from whole cloth. The real reason is that Republicans have no interest in paying for Trump’s plan, but he didn’t bother checking with them first before he proposed it. Now he needs to extricate himself from the embarrassment, and his traditional fallback is to find someone else to blame.