Buttigieg fires back at critics over timing of East Palestine visit

Pete Buttigieg said he and his team ‘were always going to go’ to East Palestine regardless of what Donald Trump or anyone else had said or done

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg on Sunday hit back at critics who have claimed his visit to the East Palestine, Ohio, train derailment site last month was a response to former president Donald Trump’s trip there.

“That’s bulls***,” he said when asked about the claim — made by Mr Trump and others — that his decision to visit the derailment site was driven by the ex-president’s own travel plans.

Mr Buttigieg said he and his team “were always going to go” there regardless of what Mr Trump or anyone else had said or done.

Mr Buttigieg did concede that he should have made his way to East Palestine sooner, but he suggested that critics who claim he and the Biden Administration have ignored the disaster there because it is in a mostly white area that voted for Mr Trump in the last election are being disingenuous.

“It’s really rich to see some of these folks – the former president, these Fox hosts – who are literally lifelong card-carrying members of the East Coast elite, whose top economic policy priority has always been tax cuts for the wealthy, and who wouldn’t know their way around a T.J. Maxx if their life depended on it, to be presenting themselves as if they genuinely care about the forgotten middle of the country,” he said.

He also said Mr Trump’s trip there was “somewhat maddening” because the ex-president and his former administration “did a lot try to gut not just rail safety regulations, but the EPA,” yet he still went to the town to give out “bottled water and campaign swag”. Mr Buttigieg further criticised his GOP critics as “people who have sided with the rail industry again and again and again” who are now attacking him and the administration and “suddenly acting like rail safety advocates”.

At the same time, Mr Buttigieg acknowledged that he did not correctly estimate how much of his role on Mr Biden’s cabinet would involve political stagecraft rather than administrative work.

“Sometimes people need policy work, and sometimes people need performative work,” he told CNN. “And to get to this level, you’ve got to be ready to serve up both”.