High speed around the world rarely gets people taking more than about a 5 hour trip. I'm sure a few would take such a train, but not near enough to make it worth the cost of building an maintaining it. In the mean time everyone talking about that distracts from building transportation that people would use.

If you want trains in the US then you need to focus on the DC-NYC-Boston route - this should be an obvious route with affordable high speed trains every 10 minutes all day. You also need to get local trains to stop bloating the costs such that nothing but the most dense areas can afford to build them. Solve those and then start focusing on areas where trains are harder.