Wrecker of reputations
By Susan B. Glasser
7:43 P.M.
In the first year of the Trump Presidency, White House advisers often promised reporters that this would be the week when they would unveil Trumps plans for a massive investment in American infrastructure. On the campaign trail, Donald Trump had vowed to spend a trillion dollars rebuilding roads, bridges, and airports ... But, of course, Infrastructure Week never happened. There was always some distraction ... Infrastructure Week lived on as an Internet meme, a Twitter hashtag, a joke; it became shorthand for the Administrations inability to stay on message ...
Trump never fully gave up on the infrastructure idea, though, and this week he resurrected it in a rare meeting with congressional Democratic leaders, who emerged from the White House on Tuesday morning, smiling and apparently excited. The President, they explained, had decided to double the price tag of his proposal, from a trillion to two trillion dollars, because it sounded more impressive ...
But it was all just a form of Washington performance art. There are no Republican votes for such an expensive package, as the Democrats well knew, and there is no way that the Presidents allies on Capitol Hill, nor his own penny-pinching White House chief of staff, would agree to such a budget-busting deal ...
By late Tuesday, the news cycle had moved on ... By Thursday .. The constitutional crisis was back on ...
The Trump Presidency has been a great wrecker of reputations ...
https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-trumps-washington/trump-wrecker-of-reputations