It is "Infrastructure-Touting Week" again at the White House. I say this, of course, to draw a stark distinction between President Joe Biden launching a media blitz (to boast of his ongoing achievements in improving America's infrastructure) and the former president, for whom "Infrastructure Week" became the punchline to a long-running and rather sad joke.

In 2016, Donald Trump campaigned heavily on improving American infrastructure, pointing often to how dilapidated and run-down American facilities such as airports had become while comparing them (unfavorably) to those in other countries. He promised on the campaign trail to usher in a new era of infrastructure improvement, where he would personally make everything wonderful. This, of course, never came to pass. Trump -- who published a (ghost-written) book titled The Art Of The Deal -- could never close any such deal with congressional negotiators (despite the fact that the Democrats were the ones who wholeheartedly backed infrastructure spending). Trump never got any infrastructure bill through Congress -- he was all talk and no action, in the end. This normally wouldn't have been all that noticeable but for the Trump administration proclaiming again and again that this week was going to be "Infrastructure Week" -- which was supposed to be followed by the same sort of media blitz Joe Biden just launched today.

The only problems, with Trump's Infrastructure Weeks, were that nothing ever got done and Trump himself kept stepping all over his lines. The very first Infrastructure Week was derailed by Trump complaining about James Comey's testimony before Congress (on Russian interference in the 2016 election). The most notable derailment was when Trump did a dog-and-pony show with his secretary of Transportation, after which he was asked about the recent White supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia (Trump: "...you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides"). So much for infrastructure....

The site PoliticalDictionary.com cites three media excerpts on its page defining "Infrastructure Week," which sum up the arc the term took during Trump's presidency. The first, from The Hill, marked the first time Trump attempted to brand the week, in 2017:

Much of the derailment on the infrastructure rollout has been of President Trump's own making. He repeatedly veered off message in tweets and during infrastructure-themed speeches, flouting some of the White House staffers' carefully laid plans.

The next two are from 2019, the first from The Week:

The words "Infrastructure Week" have become synonymous with any unsuccessful or clumsy attempts to get an actual policy off the ground, as well as with the administration's odd tendency of pushing infrastructure whenever unfavorable headlines start appearing in the news.

And finally, from the New York Times:

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.

In contrast to Trump's failures, Joe Biden didn't just talk about infrastructure investment, he actually got it done. Multiple times, in fact, and often with bipartisan support in Congress. He got the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the CHIPS Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act all passed, to name just three big examples (there are others, as well). All will make major investments in America's infrastructure.

Today Biden decided to take a little victory lap to remind Americans of his historic infrastructure achievements. He held a ceremony at the White House where he announced that $42 billion was now being dispersed to the states in "the biggest investment in high-speed internet ever." In his remarks, he drew a contrast between his vision of governmental priorities and the old Reagan-era idea of "trickle-down economics," which (obviously) doesn't help anyone but those already at the top of the heap:

I ran for president with a fundamentally different vision: to build the economy from the middle out and the bottom up instead of the top down; to grow the economy by educating and empowering workers, by promoting competition to support small businesses, and investing in ourselves again for the first time in a long time.

And that's what today's announcement is all about.

You know, what we're doing is, as I said, not unlike what Franklin Delano Roosevelt did when he brought electricity to nearly every American home and farm in our nation.

Today, Kamala and I are making an equally historic investment to connect everyone in America -- everyone in America to high-speed Internet by -- and affordable high-speed Internet -- by 2030.

It's the biggest investment in high-speed Internet ever, because for today's economy to work for everyone, Internet access is just as important as electricity was or water or other basic services.

Biden, at the start of his re-election campaign, is going to lean in to the subject in a big way. It should be mentioned that this isn't even the first "Infrastructure-Touting Week" for Biden, it's actually the second one. The first one was rolled out back in May. But Biden's weeks aren't the punchline to a joke anymore, since he has turned things around from Trump's Groundhog Day farce into what Biden regularly calls (to "take back" the term) the start of the "Infrastructure Decade" -- where projects are actually getting built to make people's lives better.

As I said, Team Biden is leaning in to touting his achievements in a very big way, starting today. They updated their progress report on the successes of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, and they announced a three-week blitz of cabinet members fanning out across the country to make their individual cases about improvements that are now becoming reality, in every state. This tour will include visits to over twenty states and will be spearheaded by First Lady Jill Biden (on education infrastructure), Vice President Kamala Harris, and Joe Biden himself. There's also even a new "Invest.gov" page where you can see all the new projects mapped out all over the country.

What was a little astonishing, at least to me, was that this morning when the phrase "Bipartisan Infrastructure Law" was trending on Twitter, I saw several messages bragging about how much each state or congressional district was going to get from it posted by Republicans. You can't get much more bipartisan than that -- both sides of the aisle bragging and making political hay over the bill when it gets implemented. It doesn't get much better than that, in politics.

Under Donald Trump, "Infrastructure Week" was a sad punchline for Trump's continuing failure to even partially make good on all his sweeping campaign promises. Under Joe Biden, America's infrastructure is going to be rebuilt, in multiple directions at once. He deserves a victory lap, and he is smart to try to communicate what all of it is going to mean to average Americans as well. The more "Infrastructure-Touting Weeks" the better, as far as I am concerned.

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant