‘I’m Glad He’s Not an EMT’: Mocked by Comedians, Buttigieg Defends Visit to Ohio Derailment Site
Transportation secretary challenges Trump to support boosted train safety measures
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg visited East Palestine, Ohio, Thursday, weeks after a train carrying hazardous chemicals derailed in the town in a fiery explosion which has left behind concerns about toxic contamination.
Buttigieg and others defended his visit to the town in eastern Ohio as part of an overall response by the Biden administration — and he even challenged Donald Trump to back heightened train-safety regulations.
The transportation secretary is the highest-ranking official from the administration to visit East Palestine, meeting with residents anxious that they now have to deal with dangerous chemical contamination in their community, perhaps for decades.
A total of 38 cars derailed in the crash, 11 of which were carrying hazardous materials. Residents later reported feeling unwell, and some 45,000 animals have died as a result of a toxic train crash this month in an Ohio town, environmental officials have said.
Late-night comedian Stephen Colbert used the Buttigieg visit fodder for his CBS show.
“Speaking of transit, it’s been 20 days since the horrific train derailment and chemical spill in East Palestine, Ohio. And today transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg finally visited the site. Twenty days late,” Colbert noted before riffing at the secretary's expense.
“I’m glad he’s not an EMT. ‘Let’s see here. Time of death: three weeks ago. Clear!’” Colbert joked. “Looks like Buttigieg knows he acted too slowly, admitting that he ‘could have spoken out sooner,’” the comedian added, before joking that Buttigieg said, “And I would’ve been here earlier, but traffic was a mess, the trains are a disaster, and all the flights were canceled. Someone should really deal with this country’s transportation! I had to take a city bike.’”
In seriousness, Buttigieg called for compassion for the people of East Palestine rather than try to use them to try to score political points.
“The country should be wrapping their arms around the people of East Palestine, not as a political football, not as an ideological flashpoint, not as a gotcha moment, but as thousands of human beings whose lives got upended through no fault of their own,” the former mayor of South Bend, Ind., said.
Buttigieg also took a swipe at the former president, who made his own visit to a McDonald's in East Palestine as part of Trump’s sputtering campaign to regain the Republican presidential nomination to seek another term.
“Well, one thing he could do is express support for reversing the deregulation that happened on his watch,” the Biden official said. “I heard him say he had nothing to do with it, even though it was in his administration.”
The response by the administration, to the disaster has been the subject of near-constant criticism from the political right for weeks.
But, in a TV interview later in the day, Buttigieg took those critics — including hard-right Fox News propagandist Tucker Carlson — to task.
“Yeah, I don’t know where Tucker Carlson was when they were trying to dismantle the EPA, which is now maybe the main thing standing between the people of East Palestine and ecological disaster,” he said, in an on-camera appearance on MSNBC host Joy Reid's program, referring to treatment of the Environmental Protection Agency during the Trump administration. “Look, they’re always ready to take it back to race. But the reality is that we’re going to serve everybody. That’s how this administration works. We’re not out there to bring resentment. We’re out there to bring results.”
Meanwhile, the White House had no news of a potential visit to the derailment site by President Biden.
“Again, I don’t have anything to share on a presidential visit, not at this time, or anything to announce, but it does matter that the president put forth a multi-agency kind of reaction to this,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Thursday.
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