Pete Buttigieg admits he got it wrong on the Ohio train derailment response.
But while the criticism is fair, he says, the critics are mostly not.
“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,” the Transportation Secretary said. “You think Tucker Carlson knows the difference between a T.J. Maxx and a Kohl’s?”
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.
But he also punched back at critics, arguing that many of the problems he’s being blamed for are only partially connected to his portfolio and mostly out of his direct control.
Buttigieg came into the Cabinet knowing this would be an odd transition – he’s the only winner of the Iowa caucuses and one-time Jimmy Kimmel guest host to take a lower-level Cabinet job. He didn’t realize just how much focus there would be on a Cabinet role that was once seen as mostly apolitical in past administrations.
Now, to the left, the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, is the corporatist compromiser without the vision or guts to go as big as he should. To the right, he is the embodiment of elitist abandonment of real Americans, hopped up on his own grandiosity, who thinks more about social engineering…
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