Michael Dwyer/AP Photo
Deepwater Wind turbines off Block Island, Rhode Island, August 2016
Standing on a stage Tuesday in a downtown Washington hotel ballroom full of public officials and industry leaders working on North America’s top energy, transportation, water, and other projects, Larry Kudlow, the director of President Trump’s National Economic Council, quipped that he knew “virtually nothing” about infrastructure.
He then proceeded to prove his point.
Ostensibly, his subject was “Driving North America Infrastructure Forward.” But what the North American Infrastructure Leadership Forum audience got was a running monologue of factoids and careless commentary. He slotted economy, trade policy, and infrastructure needs into distinct silos, failing to weld them together. It was another instance of the Trump administration tilting at leadership and falling short on major issues like the U.S. infrastructure crisis.
Kudlow trotted out the economic indicators to which Trump invariably points: low rates of unemployment and inflation, and increases in disposable income and household net worth. He cited a Moody’s Analytics survey that projected that, should the trends hold, the president could win re-election in a landslide.
Trump’s mercurial China trade policies continue to send destabilizing shudders throughout the international economy. Kudlow dealt with the topic with the sort of overwrought superlatives beloved of Trump himself. “In all of economic and trade history there has never been the scope of negotiations of this type. Ever,” he said. “If you include other issues such as human rights and national security, then I would say without question that you have never witnessed such a wide, broad, deep scope [of discussions] between two rival countries.”
He lauded the “solid, pro-growth” U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, and even Nancy Pelosi came in for praise for being “cooperative and accommodating and successful” in the negotiations. On Europe, the pro-Brexit Kudlow salivated over the prospect of a free-trade deal with Britain if the country can extricate itself from the European Union, lamenting, “I guess politics in Britain are just as screwed up as they are here,” said amid laughter and a feeble “off-the-record, it-was-a-joke” request.
If ever there was a moment for a public official to plead a busy schedule and depart, this was it.
Finally, about 25 minutes in, Kudlow appeared to remember the keynote’s topic and picked up the infrastructure thread by stressing the Trump administration’s work on dialing back environmental regulations in the interest of expedited project timelines.
Then, in one of the most exquisite displays of tone-deafness by any public official at any level of government, not only did Kudlow downplay any increases in federal funding for states and localities, he declared that the days of robust federal matches were over. “I would like to say we had it, we’d give it to you,” he said. “But we don’t have it and I wouldn’t give it to you anyway—you can raise the money privately.”
If ever there was a moment for a public official to plead a busy schedule and depart, this was it. But Kudlow stayed on to take questions, using his self-deprecating wit as a shield against his inability to answer any of them.
One woman asked if the administration decided to add an infrastructure component to the USMCA Agreement to make up for deficiencies in NAFTA. Kudlow was stumped. “I’m not sure,” he said. “There might be,” he added.
A question about the president’s inability to come to any agreement on infrastructure earlier this year with Pelosi and Chuck Schumer was simply batted away.
One of the last questions, on New Jersey’s offshore wind energy project and environmental permitting, particularly flummoxed him. “That is the most obscure question,” Kudlow said, to more laughter. “I’ll have to get back to you.”
Somehow, it is not surprising that America’s largest offshore wind energy project is a mystery to the top executive branch economic official from the planet’s foremost climate-denying government. “I will tell you, sir,” Kudlow said, “in the car ride back, I am going to google ‘New Jersey wind.’”
