Get ready, everybody, because it's nearly time for Infrastructure Week! Again! Soon!
The Trump administration is preparing to make another attempt at honoring one of the biggest unfulfilled promises of the president’s election campaign: a $1 trillion upgrade of the nation’s road, rail and energy infrastructure.
This will not happen. Mind you, the announcement might happen, but the theoretical promises involved will not. Before we get into the reasons why it will not happen, however, let us examine the fate of previous Infrastructure Weeks, one of the top running jokes of the Trump "administration."
• In June 2017, the original Infrastructure Week kicked off. It was overshadowed, if not trounced thoroughly, by the blockbuster testimony of fired FBI director James Comey in which he described Trump's efforts to block the federal investigation into Russian election hacking while Trump blustered back that the former director was a liar and hinted at (or lied about) secret recording equipment installed in the White House.
• In August 2017, the administration attempted a do-over. This quickly went off the rails when Trump, in the lobby of Trump Tower, turned his "Remarks on Infrastructure" into a blustering defense of white supremacist and neo-Nazi protesters after a far-right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, spiraled into an incident of domestic terrorism, a public bleating that still counts as perhaps the single worst moment Trump has inflicted on the nation.
• In February, 2018, they had another go at it. It was flushed down ye olden news-tubes this time by the revelation that Trump (illegally) paid a porn actress $130,000 during the campaign in order to hide an affair; by domestic violence allegations against White House aide Rob Porter accompanied by revelations that the White House knew of those allegations and apparently did nothing; and by the murder of 17 people in a Parkland, Florida, high school, causing Trump to abandon his plan to fly to Orlando to promote his new “infrastructure” thoughts.
• By next May, when the actual, industry-promoted Infrastructure Week of advocacy took place, even the Alliance for American Manufacturing was bemoaning the reliable punchline of "Infrastructure Week" while noting that the White House had, at that point, officially abandoned efforts to pass an infrastructure bill at all. ‘Twas the infrastructure week that wasn't; let us never speak of it again.
To be fair, all of this has been coincidence. It is not that the fates have conspired to thwart Team Trump's every effort to promote a plan to deal with the nation's dire infrastructure woes, it is that the Trump White House has rarely if ever been able to go an entire damn week without a new scandal sprouting up, most frequently from the president's own pie-hole.
As for why it is not bloody likely that a new infrastructure week is truly in the cards, either next month or next year, it is because no matter how desperately the nation needs to address its rapidly decaying roads, bridges, and other public works, Team Trump's attempts to address the problem have primarily consisted of weird grift-promotion schemes in which rampant privatization of those roads and bridges is theorized to be the only way to see them patched up, and that has garnered widespread derision even when the plans were not being derailed by the latest tragedies and scandals. It isn’t just not a good plan; it is no longer even a good pretense at a plan.
In the end, neither the administration nor Republican lawmakers are willing to do anything that would require spending the necessary cash, and Republicans have waffled between indifference and active hostility to the very notion of road rebuilding, bridge repair and other fixes both during the Obama era and this one. Trump is also not likely to abandon McConnell or torment him by partnering with Democrats on new legislation, regardless of campaign promises, while Democrats are investigating all that stuff he did.
So no, it's not going to happen. Trump doesn't care enough, Republicans don't care in the slightest, a new Democratic House is going to instantly resurrect the ever-frightening Deficit Monster (He Who Must Be Sated), the usual "centrist" crowd doesn't give a flying damn which bridges fall into which rivers so long as wealthy patrons get another round of tax cuts—helicopters aren’t going to buy themselves, you know—and we can expect largely everything to be derailed while we hash out, in raw and nasty and mostly insincere public arguments, just how overtly criminal we're going to allow our political leaders to be before we show them the door. If there's a new infrastructure week, it will be constructing a new prison luxurious enough to meet the needs of all the high-ranking political hacks being indicted. It will have a heated pool, and the champagne will flow freely.