Trump's bridges to nowhere

Stage 2: Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer are at the White House on Wednesday, waiting for the president to arrive and discuss a plan to raise the money.

Stage 3: Kaboom.

The president walked into the room, declined to take a seat, failed to shake hands with anyone, and announced he was not going to talk about infrastructure while he was under investigation by Democrats.

Trump then stalked into the Rose Garden, where reporters had been assembled, and announced that everything was ruined because he heard Nancy Pelosi say “cover-up.”

“Well, it turns out I’m the most — and I think most of you would agree to this — I’m the most transparent president probably in the history of this country,” he declared. Fortunately, there was no call for a show of hands.

He then went on a rant that was — you’ll never believe this — sort of incoherent. Here’s one little taste:

“You heard so much talk about phone calls that my son made to me from this meeting that was set up by GPS Fusion, it looks like, which is the other side for those that don’t know, and for a year I heard about phone calls went to a special number unauthorized and it would have been my son Don, who is a good young man who has gone through hell, and they were calls that must have been made by him before and after the meeting.”

Two things. One is that Donald Trump Jr. is a 41-year-old father of five, despite the president’s tendency to talk about him in terms that seem to suggest he’s doing his sophomore year abroad.

Junior has been pretty much cleared of allegations that he called his dad to brag that he was going to meet with some Russians who had dirt on Hillary Clinton. This appears to be what Trump was referring to in that ... sentence. We will not make any attempt whatsoever to explain why this all popped up during a press conference on infrastructure.

The infrastructure bill was the one thing that the president and the Democratic leaders seemed to think they could really get accomplished. At a chummy meeting last month, the president suggested a $2 trillion deal — more than twice what the Democrats were expecting.

This week it was time to figure out how to raise the money. Suddenly, Trump went nuts. He was shocked, shocked, shocked to hear that Pelosi had used the word “cover-up” that day in reference to things Congress needed to investigate.

“I don’t do cover-ups,” he assured the reporters. (We will pause for a moment here while we recall Stormy Daniels.)

Pelosi, who’d been trying to beat back talk of impeachment, was hardly Trump’s biggest problem. But on Wednesday her “cover-up” comment was treated as the equivalent of World War III.

What do you think was going on there? Was Trump ...

A) Shocked, shocked to discover Pelosi didn’t believe he had been totally forthcoming with Congress?

B) Still seething about the end to “Game of Thrones”?

C) Surprised to discover $2 trillion was actually pretty hard to raise?

Maybe all three. In the very brief time it took the meeting with the Democrats to collapse, Trump’s team had managed to set up a lectern with a “NO Collusion, NO Obstruction” sign hanging over the front.

The president then told the assembled media that the investigation into his Russia relationships was a “total, horrible thing that happened to our country” and that there could be no discussion of roads or bridges while Congress was poking around his administration.

“I want to do infrastructure. I want to do it more than you want to do it,” he said to the invisible Democratic leaders from the Rose Garden. “I’d be really good at that.”

We will stop here for a minute to recall, just for the hell of it, that in Trump’s “Art of the Deal” era he was so good at building that he managed to lose more than twice as much money as any other American taxpayer.

During his Rose Garden performance, the president once again fell into the extremely creepy habit of referring to himself in the third person. (“They hated President Trump. They hated him with a passion.”)

He also began calling impeachment “the I-word,” which can be very confusing on what was supposed to be Infrastructure Day.

“Whether or not they carry the big I-word out ... when you look at all I’ve done ...” he rambled on, marching into the bog of self-pity, stopping to admire his many fictional accomplishments. (“Largest tax cut in the history of the country.”)

By the end of the day, Pelosi seemed to be flirting with the I-word herself for the first time. And the infrastructure plan sank slowly into the horizon.

Farewell, poor bill. And if you’re driving anywhere this weekend, remember the P-word is pothole.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.