The disaster in East Palestine has revealed Trumpism to be populist in the front, and corporatist in the back.
After a train derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, on February 3, national attention was slow to turn to the crash. That has now changed decisively. In the past 10 days, EPA Administrator Michael Regan, former President Donald Trump, and Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg have all visited the town. A lively national political debate has also emerged, but it’s one that, like the burning rail cars, has produced a lot of heat, but not a great deal of light.
The disaster has become a proxy battle where existing political divides are playing out—and where the failings of both of the contemporary parties are on clear display. The Democratic Party struggles to respond effectively to a crisis with empathy rather than technocratic policy lectures. The Trump-era Republican Party, meanwhile, says all the right things and advocates for all the wrong ones.
The conversation on the right is especially revealing. Some factions of conservative media have accused the mainstream press and Democratic establishment of ignoring the story, though in fact Fox News was just as late as its competitors. Nonetheless, Trump and other MAGA-minded Republicans, like Ohio’s newly elected senator, J. D. Vance, have embraced East Palestine as an example of how the Democratic Party has abandoned white working-class areas of the industrial Midwest. Tucker Carlson has gone farther, arguing that the response has been slow because the town is conservative and largely white.
The derailment is a curious type of crisis, because the material effects are so unclear.
