Although federal disaster response teams are still on the scene of a hazardous materials spill in a small Ohio village, a well-coordinated and successful Republican campaign to portray the White House’s response as indicative of its disregard for rural and working-class voters has already begun. This is due to the train derailment that released toxic chemicals in the town of East Palestine.
Conservatives created a narrative of Democratic indifference to working-class voters, who also happen to be crucial to the Republican base, by assembling storylines as diverse as President Joe Biden’s unannounced visit to Ukraine, the dedication of a transportation secretary who is among the Democratic Party’s brightest stars, and the reemergence of the GOP standard-bearer after a lacklustre return to the political stage.
As former President Donald Trump visited the disaster site in the 4,800-person town near the Ohio-Pennsylvania border on Wednesday, he appeared to be playing the comforter in chief role usually given for the president. Trump, who was the first Republican to launch his run for president in December but hasn’t gained much momentum since, used the trip as a thinly veiled campaign event. In the 2020 election, he easily won the county where East Palestine is situated and won the pivotal swing state by a narrow margin.
Trump visited with representatives in East Palestine, sent supplies and bottles of water, and bought first responders lunch at a fast food joint,showing signs of wanting to revive the populist fervour that characterised his victorious 2016 campaign. Schools were closed due to security concerns surrounding the former president’s visit, according to local news sources. Trump supporters, including allegedly those selling Trump-themed products, met him on the ground.
Trump has blasted the Biden administration’s response to the tragedy, saying that the locals had been “abandoned,” like other Republicans have done. On Wednesday, he called the response “indifference and betrayal.”
Yet, the path leading up to that political turning point began weeks earlier, with the Feb,3 and spilled toxic material, causing the area to be evacuated and to be burned under controlled conditions. Although federal environmental regulators determined it was safe, many homeowners returned; however, some have reported experiencing medical problems like headaches and nausea, and they are hesitant to use the tap water.
The Environmental Protection Agency has been on the ground, monitoring and testing contamination levels and speaking with locals. The federal government has ordered Norfolk Southern to plan and fund the cleanup. This week, Ohio’s Republican Governor Mike DeWine and EPA Administrator Michael Regan went to the area to listen to residents’ worries and show the water’s safety by drinking it themselves.
Yet prominent Republicans had already recognised the disaster’s potential for greater political importance.
Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio, a Republican who accompanied the former president on his trip this week, claimed in an interview with Axios that Republicans like Trump, Tucker Carlson of Fox News, and himself understood that East Palestine residents and people like them made up the majority of the party’s supporters.
“We three immediately understood that this is fundamentally our voting base in our respective ways: These people are kind of ours. It is a comparatively rural area. Industrialization has an impact,” Vance remarked. They are the folks that suffered the most when China took over our manufacturing base, and unless specific voices ensure that their concerns are prioritised, the media will forget about them.”
Republicans attacked the Biden administration broadly for its response—or lack thereof—following the accident, first focusing on Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, even calling for the 2020 Democratic presidential candidate to be fired.
Several Democrats, such as the centrist Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, did fault the administration for their slow response. The White House disavowed responsibility by claiming that the Trump administration was to blame for the repeal of several environmental regulations, entangling the problem in a decade of regulatory finger-pointing. The administration highlighted a rule from the Obama administration requiring more sophisticated brakes on trains carrying hazardous commodities.
The majority of House Republicans sought to defund our authority to safeguard drinking water last year, and Congressional Republicans lay the basis for the Trump Administration to rip away rules for more effective train brakes,” said Andrew Bates, deputy press secretary for the White House.
Federal environmental and transportation authorities arrived on the scene within hours after the accident, according to officials. According to a preliminary assessment published on Thursday, federal safety investigators are concentrating on an overheated axel.
GOP criticism, however, peaked earlier this week when Biden made a clandestine and risky trip to war-torn Kyiv, halfway across the globe, to meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and commemorate the one-year anniversary of Russia’s invasion,Then, he went to Poland to drum up support among Ukraine’s Western allies.
In an interview with Fox News, Trent Conaway, the mayor of East Palestine, claimed that the villagers felt “slapped in the face” by Biden’s trip to Ukraine.
He is free to send whichever agency he chooses, but I learned that this morning. And at one of the briefings he attended, it was discussed handing out millions of dollars to people there rather than to us. And I’m furious,” Conaway said.
Republican members of Congress read from the same script, especially those who have criticised the vociferous US support for Ukraine.
Sen. Eric Schmitt, a Missouri Republican, tweeted this week, “If you want to understand why so many Americans are unhappy right now: Biden is in Ukraine before Ohio.”
Some on the right have gone farther, asserting that the “woke” left is discriminating against white, rural people in its response to the crisis because of their race.
In a recent episode of his Fox News show, Carlson claimed that East Palestine was largely made up of white people and that it was politically conservative. “It shouldn’t matter. Yet, as you’re about to learn, it definitely is.
Carlson then made a connection between the administration’s response and Buttigieg’s recent statements promising to uphold equity within the Department of Transportation as well as recent DOT funding for road repairs in significant cities like Detroit and Philadelphia and underserved communities like the Indian Nations Council of Governments in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
These remarks were repeated by Vance, who slammed Buttigieg for recent statements he made regarding the opportunity to create more jobs for locals and the importation of white construction workers to minority-majority regions with significant unemployment.
“The secretary of transportation is not discussing this matter, is not discussing how frequently trains derail in our nation, is discussing how there are too many white,Instead of the fact that our trains are colliding at frightening rates, we should be focusing on male construction workers, Vance said Fox News. The man must perform his duties.
Buttigieg and the Biden administration, as well as those who claim Republicans are taking a cheap shot at a prominent Democrat and possible presidential candidate, have been put on the back foot by the GOP narrative.
On Thursday, Buttigieg travelled to East Palestine for the first time since the event in early February. Although he admitted that he should have made his public statement sooner, he claimed that he was attempting to “respect the role that I have, the role that I do not have.”
I’m here for the work and not for the politics, he said in answer to a question from reporters about how his political aspirations line up with his response.
Other elected officials and lawmakers, according to Buttigieg, should support those who have had their life turned upside down rather than using them as a political football, an ideological flashpoint, or a “gotcha moment.”
