In a Labor Day speech in Philadelphia this week, President Joe Biden had a little fun talking about an area where he succeeded — and Donald Trump failed.
“We used to have the best infrastructure in the world and then we fell to #13 in the world,” the Democrat said. “But guess what? The great real-estate builder — the last guy here, he didn’t build a damn thing. Under my predecessor, ‘infrastructure week’ became a punchline. On my watch, infrastructure is being a decade.”
This apparently didn’t sit well with some of the Republican’s allies. Here, for example, is what Fox News’ Brian Kilmeade told Sen. Marco Rubio on the air yesterday:
“You know why [infrastructure legislation didn’t pass under Trump]? Because of the Russia stuff that they brought up at the time! Every time they roll out infrastructure, some other fake Russian lead would pop up and distract everybody.”
The Florida senator agreed.
“Well, that, and a global pandemic in which local authorities across the country were prohibiting people from working.”
So, a couple of things.
Right off the bat, we know exactly why Trump’s push for an infrastructure package failed, and it wasn’t because of “the Russia stuff” or the pandemic. As regular readers might recall, GOP officials spent much of the then-president’s first two years working on repealing the Affordable Care Act (an initiative that failed) and a package of regressive tax breaks (which passed, though the party stopped talking about them because the policy was so unpopular).
After the 2018 midterm elections, however, which left the House in Democratic hands, there were still hopes that an infrastructure deal could come together, and Democratic leaders were prepared to make it happen.
Trump had other ideas. According to the Republican’s own version of events, the then-president presented Democrats with an offer: The White House would work on infrastructure if Democrats agreed to stop investigating Trump scandals. Democratic leaders, naturally, said that wasn’t an option — they added, of course, that Congress can legislate and conduct oversight at the same time — at which point Trump abandoned the process.
But just as notable was the Fox host treating the Russia scandal as if it were nonsense, and Rubio going along with the line. If anyone in GOP politics knows better, it’s the senior Republican senator from Florida.
Circling back to our earlier coverage, after Russia launched an expansive and expensive covert military intelligence operation that targeted the U.S. political system in 2016, the Senate Intelligence Committee launched a lengthy and thorough investigation. The panel ultimately published voluminous findings, which arrived at a variety of important conclusions, including the apparent fact that the Russian government “directed extensive activity, beginning in at least 2014 and carrying into at least 2017, against U.S. election infrastructure at the state and local level.”
While the committee didn’t find evidence of Russian attackers going so far as to change votes, congressional investigators did conclude that Moscow’s efforts “exploited the seams between federal authorities and capabilities, and protections for the states.” This, of course, was the same Senate panel that literally described a “direct tie between senior Trump Campaign officials and the Russian intelligence services” as part of its official findings. This was not an obscure document unrelated to Rubio’s work on Capitol Hill; he was the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee when the panel released its findings. If Trump’s allies are looking for a credible excuse to explain away Trump’s failure on infrastructure, they’ll have to look elsewhere. This post updates our related earlier coverage.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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