How ‘Infrastructure Week’ Became a Long-Running Joke

WASHINGTON — At this point in the Trump presidency, “Infrastructure Week” is less a date on the calendar than it is a “Groundhog Day”-style fever dream doomed to be repeated.

Roughly two years after the White House first came up with the idea of discussing, for all of seven days, the pursuit of a bipartisan agreement to rebuild the nation’s roads, bridges and broadband networks, President Trump more or less torpedoed those plans on Wednesday in a Rose Garden speech. In the process, he gave Democrats a helpful sound bite when he said he would not pursue a legislative agenda while under investigation by House committees.

He also gave them another opportunity to charge that Mr. Trump, who has promised to deliver on an infrastructure plan since his first days in office, doesn’t really care about working together on one at all.

“I knew he was looking for a way out,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi told her fellow Democrats who had gathered in the Cabinet Room for the meeting with the president, according to two people familiar with the scene. “We were expecting this.”

If this all sounds familiar, that’s because it is. Long ago, the political and pundit class began to recognize any mention of infrastructure-themed events as a catchall joke symbolizing any substantive — if pie-in-the-sky — policy objective destined to go nowhere.

During the first Infrastructure Week, in June 2017, White House aides dutifully plugged along with topical messaging, hoping to distract from more pressing controversies, until Mr. Trump closed out a Rose Garden event by accusing James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, of committing perjury in his congressional testimony about the president’s behavior during an investigation into his campaign’s ties to Russia.