EDITOR’S NOTE: Each week we cross-post an excerpt from Katrina vanden Heuvel’s column at the WashingtonPost.com. Read the full text of Katrina’s column here.

President Trump’s address to Congress last Tuesday was predictably loaded with falsehoods and malice. Between dissembling on the economy and vilifying immigrants, however, Trump did make room for one conspicuous show of bipartisanship. “I am asking both parties to come together to give us the safe, fast, reliable and modern infrastructure our economy needs and our people deserve,” he said.

Trump has been promising to rebuild the nation’s dangerously outdated infrastructure for nearly three years now. “We’re becoming a Third World country,” he declared during his campaign announcement, “because of our infrastructure.” During his inaugural address, Trump bemoaned that “America’s infrastructure has fallen into disrepair and decay,” pledging to “build new roads, and highways, and bridges, and airports, and tunnels, and railways all across our wonderful nation.” As of last week’s State of the Union, the new infrastructure, like Trump’s name on the facade of a skyscraper, will be “gleaming.”

The problem is that Trump has failed to put forward anything that remotely resembles a credible plan. Instead, he’s attempting to pass off a privatization scheme as a public-works project.

Read the full text of Katrina’s column here.