Nancy, Chuck And Trumpanzee vs McConnell, McCarthy And The GOP Deep State

Trump Jumps Ship by Nancy Ohanian

Today Pelosi and Schumer are heading over to the White House-- this time at their own request-- to talk with Trumpanzee about infrastructure. This has McConnell and McCarthy fuming, primarily because Trump's own views on this are far more in synch with the Democrats than with the Republicans. Like the Democrats, he's looking to spend-- and spend big-- and wants signs everywhere that will say "this project is being built for you by Señor Donald J. Trumpanzee," or something along those lines.

Jonathan Swan broke the story at Axios that Trump told Richard Neal, chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, that he wants to spend close to $2 trillion on infrastructure. It isn't just McConnell and McCarthy who oppose him. Many in his own Regime are against it and it's unclear if he has the juice to get it through. Pelosi and Schumer want to get him to take a stand for what he-- and they-- want, even if it means McConnell, McCarthy and Trump's own skin-flint chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, have fits. The White House plan-- which Trump disparagingly calls "Gary's Plan" was put together by Gary Cohen before Trump canned him.

The "Gary Plan" was meant to authorize building out infrastructure through "public-private partnerships"-- leveraging a modest amount of government spending to stimulate private investment in projects around the country, which is a non-starter among Democrats and isn't something Trump is at all enthusiastic about either, having used the method to rip off the government and well aware of how it would be used to rip off tax dollars again.

Behind the scenes: Trump came into office imagining a presidency in which new projects-- "built by the Trump administration"-- would be erected all over the country, sources close to him tell me.

• There was a genuine naivety about the prospect of Democrats and Republicans coming together to do something on a grand scale with infrastructure," a former White House official told me. "It was one of those things where Trump said it was gonna be easy. He really thought so."
• In an early 2017 infrastructure meeting at the White House with his friend, New York real estate billionaire Richard LeFrak, Trump laid out his grand Trumpian vision. "They say Eisenhower was the greatest infrastructure president. They named the highway system after him," Trump said, per a source who was in the room. "But we're going to do double, triple, quadruple, what Eisenhower did."

Kudlow, who's leading the White House team on this, isn't any more enthusiastic about it than the rest of the Republicans, who would rather give their wealthy donors more tax cuts than spend money on infrastructure, especially if the money spent has to include a revenue plan (i.e., taxes).

Pelosi and Schumer aren't prepared to move unless Trump agrees to spend real federal dollars on this and raise the money needed with taxes that don't penalize working families. They are also insisting that all materials used in all the projects be American-made, something Trump will agree to instantly but that the Republican Party leaders never will. Today should be fun.

Trump Jump Ship II by Nancy Ohanian