Republican corruption and carelessness led to devastation in Michigan: Does Trump care? - Salon

In a move strikingly reminiscent of the Ukraine scandal, Trump took to Twitter on Wednesday to threaten to withhold federal funding from Michigan, even as floodwaters from the two breached dams forced thousands of residents of the city of Midland to flee their homes.

Whitmer "must now 'set you free' to help." Whitmer said at a news briefing on Tuesday that she had already contacted federal officials for help and activated the National Guard.

The owner of the breached dams, Lee Mueller, who heads a company called Boyce Hydro, has been cited numerous times in recent years.

But Mueller, a Trump supporter who publicly backed the president against impeachment in a Reuters article last year, didn't want to pay to repair them.

Jokes about Trump's always-impending and never-arriving "Infrastructure Week" have long gone stale, but it's worth remembering that increased infrastructure spending, like the kind needed to upgrade the nation's aging water infrastructure, was one of Trump's biggest campaign promises. .

"We have a great plan and we are going to rebuild our infrastructure," Trump said on Fox Business Network in an August 2016 appearance.

While Trump did sign a 2018 water infrastructure bill, that legislation, which passed the Senate 99-1, was a bipartisan reauthorization of $6 billion in federal funding for state-level projects that must be renewed every two years.

In contrast, Trump signed an executive order rolling back Obama-era environmental standards that required the federal government to account for climate change in infrastructure projects, and also directed agencies to loosen water regulations in California. .

"The state agencies clearly care more about mussels living in the impoundment than they do about the people living downstream of the dams," Mueller said in a statement.

But even as some Republicans are reportedly lobbying for Trump to revisit his pledge to invest in infrastructure — pandemic relief funding provides "a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to give a facelift to the country," Sen.

The company that won the contract, Fisher Sand and Gravel, has been repeatedly lauded by the president in White House meetings with border officials and military commanders, the result of a long and personalized marketing pitch to Trump and ardent supporters of his barrier project.