Nearly a month after the Ohio train crash, Pete Buttigieg finally decided to show up to work.
He has intentionally ignored responding to the crisis for weeks.
But now, Buttigieg is finally admitting the unthinkable.
A month after the Ohio train derailment exposed the incompetency and indifference of Joe Biden’s federal government, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg is under fire like never before.
Buttigieg was slammed for his lackluster response to the train crash, refusing to even acknowledge the problem until weeks after the incident.
Making matters worse, Buttigieg did not even bother to visit the site of the accident until an avalanche of public pressure forced him to do so.
Now, the Ohio accident is exposing just how unequipped Buttigieg is to do this job, and how little Joe Biden’s administration cares about working-class Americans.
But the indifference of Biden and his political allies has not shielded them from legitimate forms of criticism over this accident, and the primary target of these criticisms has largely been Buttigieg, who has chosen to blatantly ignore his job rather than speak to people that he and Biden regularly look down on.
But even Buttigieg is occasionally forced to bow to public pressure, as he finally did by visiting East Palestine nearly a month after the accident first took place.
And it was shortly after his photo-op visit to the disaster site that Buttigieg finally began to admit that he had made a mistake.
CNN reports, “Pete Buttigieg admits he got it wrong on the Ohio train derailment response. In an exclusive interview with CNN, Buttigieg acknowledged mistakes. He said he should have gone to East Palestine, Ohio, earlier. He said he failed to anticipate the political fallout from the toxic train derailment, despite months of transportation problems like mass flight cancellations and an air traffic control system shutdown that left many Americans frustrated.”
This admission of fault is a rare thing for Buttigieg, who once saw his appointment as Transportation secretary to merely be a stepping stone for him to run for president once again.
Buttigieg thought he would have to do nothing but give irrelevant speeches about how there isn’t enough “diversity” in the construction industry, and how Democrats in Congress should be given billions more in additional taxpayer money to fork over to union bosses in order to build more “high-speed rail.” And after serving either four or eight years doing this and collecting a paycheck, he could launch yet another presidential bid.
Instead, he found himself thrown into a position that he had zero qualifications for.
And now that he’s being asked to answer for his actions, or lack thereof, Buttigieg is being placed on the defensive for the first time.
Yet even his admission of fault was laced with a dismissive attitude towards the job he was asked to do.
“Sometimes people need policy work, and sometimes people need performative work,” Buttigieg told CNN in his recent interview. “And to get to this level, you’ve got to be ready to serve up both.”
The fact that Buttigieg calls showing up to East Palestine an act of “performative work” goes to show just how unserious he is about the job he is currently doing.
And it’s comments like these which show that even when he’s apologizing, Buttigieg doesn’t actually believe he did anything wrong.
