After previously indicating he would go to East Palestine, Ohio, only when the time was right, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg is now scheduled to travel to the site of the train derailment and environmental disaster on Thursday—which, coincidentally, is a day after Donald Trump’s visit upstaged the Biden administration.
According to NBC News, “Buttigieg plans to meet with community members, receive an update from the National Transportation Safety Board’s investigation on the disaster and hear from Transportation Department investigators who were on the ground in the hours after the Feb. 3 derailment, the department said in a statement ahead of his trip.”
Donald Trump ripped the Biden administration for its indifference during his visit on Wednesday.
“Unfortunately, as you know, in too many cases, your goodness and perseverance were met with indifference and betrayal in some cases,” Trump told local residents. “And Biden and FEMA said they would not send aid to East Palestine under any circumstance.”
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“When I announced that I was coming, they changed their tune. It was an amazing phenomenon,” he continued, later adding that he “opened up the dam and we got them to move.”
“They were intending to do absolutely nothing for you,” he added. “They could have been here two weeks earlier, at least a week earlier, but they decided to do it this way, and I guess it came from the top.”
A Transportation Department spokesperson claimed that the timing of Buttigieg’s visit coincided with the EPA’s “moving out of the emergency response phase and transitioning to the long-term remediation phase.”
