Signs of the shameless times pop up in Seattle

Politicians and government agencies routinely put up signs to advertise who gets the credit for public works projects. Variations on “your tax dollars at work” have been in use for a century.

But there may be no more audacious signs than the two that went up recently down in Seattle’s Sodo neighborhood. These big MAGA-red boards welcome passersby to a completely alternate reality.

“Seattle Rail Yard Modernization,” they read, at a work site entrance along Holgate Street just south of the baseball stadium.

“President Donald J. Trump, Rebuilding America’s Infrastructure. Funded by the Infrastructure Investment & Jobs Act.”

The project is a $300 million upgrade of Amtrak’s rail switching and maintenance yard. The contract was announced back in October.

Alert readers will have already calculated that Donald Trump was not the president in October. But these signs aren’t just a case of a politician having his name plastered on something he had nothing to do with — though it definitely is that.

As the signs say, the project is funded by the $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. But when that bill passed in the fall of 2021, it succeeded only despite a historic sabotage campaign waged against it by the then ex-president.

Trump, operating out of Mar-a-Lago at that point, called the bill “a loser for the USA, a terrible deal.”

He dubbed it the “Non-Infrastructure Bill.” In an unprecedented move by a former president, he attempted to rally Republicans to torpedo the effort, branding any party member who voted for it “weak, foolish and dumb.”

When 19 GOP senators and 13 House members joined with most Democrats to pass it anyway, he pretty much went off the rails.

“Republican voters will never forget their name, nor will the people of our Country,” he vowed, as if he were giving the Gettysburg Address. He said they were “RINOs” who “should be ashamed of themselves,” and promised to recruit primary challengers for them. He compared the Republicans to appeasers of the Nazis. One of his allies, U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, labeled them “traitors” to the nation.

The atmosphere was so poisonous that a constituent of one House Republican in New York called his office and said “if I see that (expletive) in the street, I am going to kill him.” The constituent was arrested and charged with harassment.

All this over a roads-and-rail bill.

Given this history, that the government’s now putting up signs giving Trump credit is a new level of Orwellian. Former President Joe Biden also had signs taking credit at project sites — and Republicans filed complaints about the practice. But at least Biden had backed the act that paid for the projects.

Rep. Rick Larsen, D-Everett, is the ranking member of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, and so helped negotiate many of the projects in the 2021 infrastructure bill. He said there’s a growing tradition of politicians opposing spending bills and then claiming credit for specific projects anyway.

“It’s called ‘vote no and take the dough,’” he said.

Others have dubbed it “vote nay, and then say yay!”

Having it both ways like this makes it hard to pass anything involving taxing and spending. If you can get the glory regardless, why bother taking the tough vote? Politicians are finding that the more shameless they are, the better.

Trump has taken this to new levels. Larsen said he was less concerned, though, about any credit-taking than about the work taking place behind the signs. Trump repeatedly sought to gut the train service during his first presidency, Larsen said — including the long-distance trains that will use this rail yard. On Wednesday, the CEO of Amtrak resigned ahead of Trump’s new overtures to slash the agency.

“If you’re going to take credit for this project, are you going to then support Amtrak in the future?” Larsen asked.

Doubtful. The red placards in Sodo likely aren’t signifying any new logic about rail or transportation policy, so much as they’re recasting recent history.

Alternatively, they could be thought of as signs of failure.

No politician takes failure well, and most try to spin their way around losses. Trump is next level at refusing to ever acknowledge defeat, which he does by insisting it was actually a smashing success (see Election, 2020). New York Times columnist Frank Bruni mused recently that this relentless reordering of reality is working: “What if failure doesn’t matter anymore? What if it can be cloaked, reclassified, contested, inverted?”

The facts are that Trump the builder tried for four years to pass an infrastructure bill, but flopped. Biden the supposedly doddering geriatric came along and pushed one through with bipartisan support — in his first year.

All the available evidence, such as Trump’s scorched-earth campaign against that Biden bill he likely wished he was sponsoring, suggests this episode drove him bitter with envy.

The Sodo signs, then, are more than just misleading. They are acts of erasure. Biden didn’t do this, they insist, Donald J. Trump did. The signs are about more than this one rail yard project. In their audacity, they are calls to “reject the evidence of your eyes and ears,” as Orwell put it.

OK, they’re just signs. So will drivers consider any of this history when they pass by? I hope so, which is why I’m laying it out here.

But let’s face it, probably not. The inverting of reality surrounding Trump works, precisely because he’s always so braggadociously committed to it. People will see the telltale red with Trump’s name and the rebuilding America stuff in front of an active industrial crane and workers in hard hats, and probably think some version of: “Huh … I sure see a lot of bad press about that guy. But look at that, he’s making something happen. He’s really putting himself out there. Even in Seattle.”

Danny Westneat: of The Seattle Times.Danny Westneat takes an opinionated look at the Puget Sound region's news, people and politics.mailto:dwestneat@seattletimes.com