President Joe Biden’s decision to finally visit East Palestine, Ohio, one year since the community suffered from a devastating train derailment, looks an awful lot like a campaign stop, several GOP strategists told the Daily Caller.
After promising to visit East Palestine, Ohio, for a year, the White House announced Wednesday that Biden would finally make a trip to visit the community to meet with residents and local officials. While the White House said an invite from East Palestine Mayor Trent Conaway played into the decision to visit the community, GOP strategists told the Daily Caller they think the election year played a bigger role.
“I think they have all these gaping political wounds, and they are just scrambling to put tiny band-aids on any of it in the hopes that it will stage the bleeding enough to get them over the finish line. But I wouldn’t mistake any of this for actual care about what happened in Ohio for actual care of what’s happening at the border. They don’t care,” Scott Jennings, a longtime GOP adviser in Kentucky and veteran of numerous campaigns, told the Daily Caller.
“They care about winning elections and they care about political power. They don’t care about the functional human toll that’s gone. They don’t care if they did care, they would have shown some attention to it already,” Jennings continued.
U.S. President Joe Biden departs the White House December 20, 2023 in Washington, DC. President Biden is traveling to Milwaukee and will deliver remarks at the Wisconsin Black Chamber of Commerce. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
On Feb. 3, 2023, a Norfolk Southern train derailed, spilling toxic chemicals into East Palestine, Ohio. Three days later on Feb. 6, a controlled burn was conducted, releasing the contaminants into the air, soil and water.
About a month after the disaster, Biden promised that he would visit the community “at some point.” Members of Biden’s administration did visit, including Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who made a trip to the town after receiving backlash for his initial response to the disaster. (RELATED: Pete Buttigieg Confronted By DCNF Reporter In DC Streets Over Response To Toxic Train Wreck)
Former President Donald Trump visited the area on Feb. 22. Trump donated pallets of water and cleaning supplies to the community to help with its recovery.
Though Biden made no plans to visit the area following the derailed train, the White House sent first responders from both the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Transportation. Then several months later, Biden issued an executive order, requiring the Federal Emergency Management Agency to appoint a Disaster Recovery Coordinator who would oversee the recovery of the town.
While the administration has continued to stress that it will hold Norfolk Southern accountable, the Department of Justice (DOJ) filed a lawsuit against the train company in March 2023.
Leslie Marshall, a Democratic strategist, admitted that she believed Biden should make the trip out to East Palestine after promising to do so. Regardless, Marshall told the Daily Caller that such a visit can sometimes do more harm than good.
“When I sit back and I think about it, there’s a number of things here. Whenever the president goes anywhere, it’s really difficult for the locals,” Marshall told the Daily Caller. “It’s a huge upheaval and distraction for local forces and traffic and things like that. And sometimes the president going to a site where there’s been a disaster is just more work and more distraction from what needs to be done to address that disaster.”
Ohio EPA and EPA contractors collect soil and air samples from the derailment site on March 9, 2023 in East Palestine, Ohio. Cleanup efforts continue after a Norfolk Southern train carrying toxic chemicals derailed causing an environmental disaster. Thousands of residents were ordered to evacuate after the area was placed under a state of emergency and temporary evacuation orders. (Photo by Michael Swensen/Getty Images)
Calls for Biden to visit the area have continued to grow over the past year. East Palestine residents told The New York Times they even felt forgotten by the president.
“I feel like I don’t matter,” Jessica Conard, an East Palestine resident, told The NYT about Biden’s lack of visit.
Now, amid campaign stops and business at the White House, Biden is heading to East Palestine to meet with locals and to assess his administration’s work in the area. As the president faces flailing poll numbers a month into a presidential election year, Mark R. Weaver, a GOP consultant, told the Daily Caller that the trip looks like an opportunity to rescue Biden from the unpopularity he faces.
“Biden’s team knows their candidate is seen as weak and ineffectual. Broken promises bolster that perception and his pledge to go to East Palestine was loudly made and quickly ignored,” Weaver told the Daily Caller. “This is a box checking exercise to deflect from Trump criticism that Biden cares more about foreigners coming across the border than Americans in red counties.”
In a series of polls, Biden is trailing Trump in hypothetical match-ups. Across key swing states, including Arizona, Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Nevada and North Carolina, Trump is leading the sitting president by as many as nine points, according to a Morning Consult/Bloomberg survey. (RELATED: Biden’s Approval Rating Hits All-Time Low: POLL)
About a week before Biden’s trip to East Palestine, Ohio, was announced, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said the president would make the trip when the time was right.
“When it is appropriate or helps — help the community for him to be there, obviously, he will be there. He’s done that,” Jean-Pierre said.
“It’s absolutely a campaign stop,” Mike McKenna, GOP consultant and MWR Strategies president, told the Daily Caller. “I doubt he’ll even talk much about rail safety.”
“And, like the LNG [liquefied natural gas] pause, it helps them talk about something other than the problems in the Middle East,” McKenna added.
Will President Biden drink the water in East Palestine?
“The president’s focus has been to do everything that he can to support this community from Day One,” @PressSec says, noting work of EPA, FEMA, and HHS.
“This is not about some sort of political stunt,” she tells RCP.
— Philip Melanchthon Wegmann (@PhilipWegmann) January 31, 2024
DJ Yokley, a local business owner in East Palestine, Ohio, told Fox News that he believes Biden is making the visit to check a box.
“The American people have awakened to realize that our the leader of our country did not show up to the greatest catastrophe of 2023,” Yokley told the outlet. “Now he’s going to show up because it is an election year, and obviously, the polls show that President Trump, came and supported us when he didn’t have to, and I think we saw right through it from the beginning.”
“I think it’s an appropriate time. He probably should have got there earlier. But marking the year anniversary of the tragedy I think is appropriate,” Brad Bannon, a Democratic strategist, told the Daily Caller. “You have to consider that the president has had a lot on his plate. I think people forget that. He’s a wartime president. We’re fighting surrogate wars. In the Middle East, which seems to be expanding and in Eastern Europe, and he’s been busy with his commitments as Commander-in-Chief.”
In addition to declining poll numbers, Biden is facing pressure to solve the growing border crisis while guiding his administration’s response to Iranian-backed groups’ attacks on U.S. interests in the Middle East and Red Sea. (RELATED: KJP Goes On Defense, Says Biden ‘Recently’ Visited The Border Over A Year Ago)
Jennings criticized Biden for not visiting the town earlier, pointing to a recent New York Post report that showed the president spent 37% of 2023 on vacation at either one of his Delaware residences, a vacation site or Camp David.
“You can’t take one of those days? One day of your 37% vacation rate days to and go deal with this? I feel like they are not operating from a position of political strength. They are scrambling, they are in panic mode,” Jennings told the Daily Caller.