![]() (President George W Bush famously claimed Brown was doing “a heck of a job”.) It also allowed Trump to present himself as the champion of blue-collar America. ![]() The Department of Transportation did not have the lead role in the accident response – that fell to the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Transportation Safety Board – but the failure of the nation’s top transportation official to appear at the disaster site for nearly three weeks inevitably recalled the incompetence and disengagement of Fema director Michael Brown during Hurricane Katrina. “I was taking pains to respect the role that I have, the role that I don’t have – but that should not have stopped me from weighing in about how I felt about what was happening.” He tweeted a photo of himself at the site along with the message that he was “amazed by the resilience and decency of the people of East Palestine”. Surveying the site of the derailment in a hard hat and safety vest, he acknowledged that he could have spoken out “sooner” about the accident. “In too many cases, your goodness and perseverance were met with indifference and betrayal.” “You are not forgotten,” Trump said in a speech not far from the accident site. He distributed thousands of bottles of Trump-branded water, walked through the town with his son Donald Trump Jr and Ohio senator JD Vance, and visited a local McDonald’s to buy food for first responders. On 22 February, Donald Trump visited East Palestine. Democratic congresswoman Ilhan Omar of Minnesota tweeted that “East Palestine railroad derailment will have a significant negative impact on the health and wellbeing of the residents for decades … We need Congressional inquiry and direct action from to address this tragedy.” In a rare show of partisanship, Senator Ted Cruz said he “fully agreed” with her. “But it happened to the poor benighted town of East Palestine, Ohio, whose people are forgotten and in the view of people who lead this country, forgettable.”īut it wasn’t just the right who complained. If the disaster had happened in a rich Washington DC neighborhood like Georgetown, he said, the National Guard would have been called in, and the story would have led every news channel. On Fox, Tucker Carlson mocked Buttigieg for commemorating “Transit Equity Day” while remaining silent about the majority-white, struggling East Palestine. Senator Marco Rubio called Buttigieg “an incompetent who is focused solely on his fantasies about his political future & needs to be fired”. “Secretary Buttigieg laughing about Chinese spy balloons, while ignoring the Ohio train derailment, shows you how out of touch Democrats are,” Ohio congressman Jim Jordan tweeted.
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