At the site of the Ohio train derailment, Trump fires up his 2024 battle plan

An environmental crisis shows Joe Biden still has work to do if he wants rust-belt votes, as John Bowden and Andrew Feinberg in Washington DC explain

Donald Trump attends a rally in Ohio (Getty)

Donald Trump took his 2024 presidential campaign to the site of a toxic chemical spill this week in a political rebuke to Joe Biden, who was overseas meeting Nato leaders ahead of the first anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The twice-impeached former president arrived in East Palestine, Ohio, to thank emergency workers for “serving bravely” in the two weeks since a freight train derailment and the subsequent controlled burn of wreckage that has led to fears among residents about groundwater pollution.

Mr Trump arrived at a nearby airport on board his private Boeing 757, with camera crews present, boasting that he had brought cases of Trump-branded bottled water for use by local residents. Footage of his arrival showed pallets of drinking water being unloaded by volunteers.

He also visited a local McDonald’s to buy food for firefighters – and for his entourage to eat on the journey home.

Mr Trump claimed that President Biden and the Federal Emergency Management Agency had “said they would not send federal aid to East Palestine under any circumstance”, and suggested that the federal government had only acted after his own visit was announced. Both statements were false.

The White House dispatched federal resources to East Palestine in the weeks following the derailment – and Mr Biden has promised locals “every resource that they need” – but the deployment of substantial federal resources requires a disaster declaration, which must be requested by the state governor, Mike DeWine.

In fact, it was on Mr Trump’s watch that the Department of Transportation repealed regulations that could have prevented the derailment by requiring better brakes on freight trains.

Ray LaHood, the Republican who served as secretary of transportation during the Obama administration, said Mr Trump’s culpability was fair game for attack. He told Politico it was “clear” that the former president’s visit to Ohio was a “political stunt”.

Rust belt test

Whatever the motive for Mr Trump’s visit on Wednesday, Mr Biden faces another test over in East Palestine. Republicans and Democrats are now duelling over responsibility for safety on America’s freight rail system, and have begun trading blows over deregulation efforts.

Meanwhile, reports of dead household pets and of health issues arising after the crash continue to flood social media, as residents question whether state and federal officials are acting with enough urgency – the latest example, they say, of an out-of-touch Washington ignoring any problem that doesn’t directly affect coastal metropolises.

A black plume rises over East Palestine, Ohio, after the controlled detonation of a portion of the derailed Norfolk Southern train (AP)

With 2024 looming closer, Ohio – along with the rest of America’s rust belt – remains a battlefield neither party is willing to cede. President Biden will face a crucial challenge in both rhetoric and focus as he doubles down on the pro-worker, pro-labour pitch that saw him recapture blue-collar votes.

Ohio remains one of Mr Trump’s favourite states to campaign in; it handed him two easy batches of electoral votes in 2016 and 2020, and last November saw the election of JD Vance, the only Trump-backed Senate candidate in a competitive race who actually won. Mr Vance capitalised on the support of the former president.

After Hillary Clinton’s 2016 defeat, while some Democrats focused their anger on Russian disinformation and the role of conspiracies on social media, others pointed to a different phenomenon: the growing conservatism of this heartland of America’s manufacturing power.

It was in Ohio where both progressives and Maga Republicans diagnosed the cause: an entire region, burned once too often by the shuttering of massive plants and the resulting collapses in local economies, had turned towards the only politician unwilling to dismiss it as “flyover country” – Trump. Even Democrats find themselves admitting that Mr Trump successfully painted himself as a hero of America’s working class – in particular, as a hero of those blue-collar union workers whose families had voted Democrat for years, maybe even decades.

‘Slap in the face’

The question for the left was clear: had the Democratic Party sacrificed its connection to the working class, and in particular to unions, in favour of chasing the suburbanite Republicans and independents who they wagered were turned off by Mr Trump’s caustic rhetoric?

For progressives, the answer continues to be yes. Senator Bernie Sanders, the progressive insurgent who gave Ms Clinton a run for her money during the 2016 primary, writes in his new book It’s OK to Be Angry About Capitalism, published this week, that Mr Trump was able to capture those voters from Ms Clinton without pushing policies that actually benefited them.

Mr Biden won 57 per cent of union households in 2020, nearly twice the margin by which Ms Clinton won them over Mr Trump in 2016. That’s a clear advantage going into these states in 2024, but not enough to claim the kind of dominance his party has relied on in the past.

He failed to capture Ohio – once a solidly purple state, but now turning deeper red as the state’s blue-collar areas fume over the continued dilapidation of America’s manufacturing industries while the suburbanite GOPers chafe over matters such as Covid guidelines and culture-war issues. Still, he recaptured Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin; all three states delivered victories for Mr Biden, thanks to hand-in-hand successes in flipping some union households back blue, while turnout surged in urban areas in a way it simply had not in 2016.

Donald Trump watches approvingly as his endorsed Senate hopeful JD Vance speaks in Youngstown, Ohio (Getty)

Now President Biden is facing that same accusation of forgetting “flyover country”, by visiting Ukraine before either he or transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg had visited the wreckage site in East Palestine.

Those frustrations were summed up by the mayor of East Palestine, Trent Conaway, who delivered a message that echoed the resentment many residents have harboured towards Washington for years.

“That was the biggest slap in the face,” he said on Fox News. “That tells you right now, he doesn’t care about us.”