President Trump traveled to Cincinnati to promote his $1 trillion infrastructure outline, taking detours to attack Democrats and the Paris climate accord.
CINCINNATI — President Trump, delivering a forceful “America first” message as he promoted his infrastructure plan, used a rally here on Wednesday to muster support from his base ahead of a nail-biting day in Congress.
Mr. Trump, bracing for testimony on Thursday by his ousted F. B. I. director, James B. Comey, traveled to the red outskirts of this blue city to pitch his 10-year, $1 trillion infrastructure outline as part of a week’s worth of events emphasizing progress on the proposal, though it has yet to be fully fleshed out.
The president delivered the speech shortly before the Senate Intelligence Committee released remarks that Mr. Comey plans to make to the panel on Thursday. In the written remarks, Mr. Comey says Mr. Trump repeatedly pressed him to announce that the president was not personally under investigation in the Justice Department’s inquiry into Russian meddling in the 2016 election.
Like so many of his speeches, Mr. Trump’s pitch on Wednesday at Rivertowne Marina was a wandering assortment of self-defenses, attacks and non sequiturs that bumped into one another like untethered barges.
He began by attacking Democrats over his health care bill, calling them “obstructionists, ” then congratulated himself for winning Ohio “not by a little, by a lot.” He trumpeted a major insurer’s pullout from health insurance exchanges here as proof of the Affordable Care Act’s “death spiral, ” and predicted that deals he had made on his overseas trip last month would create “millions of jobs.”
The president saved his harshest criticism for the Paris climate accord, vowing, to polite applause, that “we will never have outside forces telling us what to do and how to do it.”
“Believe me, that would have been a huge anchor on our country, ” he added, referring to the self-imposed environmental regulations included in the agreement.
Mr. Trump’s arrival in Cincinnati came at yet another crossroads moment: Over the past week he has tried — in fits, starts and tweets — to undertake the first real pivot of his early presidency, hoping to move beyond his mounting troubles onto the one issue on his agenda that initially garnered bipartisan support: improving the nation’s crumbling infrastructure.
Cincinnati’s mayor, John Cranley, a Democrat, said he planned to hold the president accountable for promising to fund a badly needed local project — the reconstruction of the crumbling Brent Spence Bridge, which carries traffic from two interstate highways into the city.
The project was included in a leaked list of Mr. Trump’s budget priorities, but the mayor — who accused the president of a “bait and switch” — and his staff say proposed cuts to the Highway Trust Fund in the president’s outline could delay the project.
“The weekend before the election, he literally promised to build the Brent Spence that carries I-75 over the Ohio River, ” Mr. Cranley said. “He’s got to follow through on his commitments.”
Over the past week, an angry Mr. Trump has often undercut and confounded his own aides as they try to shift the conversation toward the infrastructure plan, tweeting out new attacks on the news media and feuding with his own Justice Department over its defense of his targeted travel ban.
Just as he has shrugged off efforts by his lawyers, communications aides and Republican members of Congress to curtail his tweeting, he frequently disregarded the teleprompter here — inviting two of his old New York real estate friends, Richard LeFrak and Steven Roth, onto the dais.
The broad outlines of Mr. Trump’s $1 trillion proposal, thus far little more than a blueprint, have been public since the campaign. The plan, conceived by the commerce secretary, Wilbur Ross, and Peter Navarro, an economic adviser, calls on the federal government to spend $200 billion in cash and tax credits that would, they say, result in $800 billion in additional private investment.
In congressional testimony this year, the transportation secretary, Elaine Chao, predicted that a more detailed proposal would be released by late May. But last week she would say only that it was “coming soon.” Instead, the administration on Monday unveiled with great fanfare a longstanding proposal — which one Trump aide described as “low-hanging fruit” — to privatize the nation’s air-traffic control system .
The plan earned rare bipartisan praise and gave the president an opportunity to hold a celebratory announcement ceremony of the type he likes in the East Room of the White House.
“Welcome to the beginning of a new era for American infrastructure, ” Vice President Mike Pence said as he was introducing Mr. Trump. “Starting today, this president will take historic steps to keep his promise to rebuild America.”
But Democrats, energized by Mr. Trump’s recent stumbles, have little appetite for compromise and have criticized the president’s outline as too small, too dependent on the private sector and too reliant on new tolls and fees to pay for unprofitable projects such as rural water systems or roads needed by small businesses.
“If he had produced a real infrastructure plan, it might have been the one major issue where he could have come out of the gate and had real big support from Democrats, ” said Representative Mark Pocan, Democrat of Wisconsin, part of a group of House progressives who have drafted a $2 trillion infrastructure plan that relies on more direct federal funding.
“I think Trump understands real estate investments, and making a profit, and not paying his contractors, but I don’ t really think he understands infrastructure, ” Mr. Pocan added. “I think he understands infrastructure for Donald Trump, not infrastructure in the public interest.”
While Mr. Trump made a brief pitch on Wednesday for “Democrats and Republicans to work together, if that’s possible, ” to pass his infrastructure package, he seemed most comfortable on the attack and surrounded by his friends.
Mr. Trump was introduced by three cabinet officials, including the Environmental Protection Agency administrator, Scott Pruitt.
