There is a good reason East Palestine, Ohio, Mayor Trent Conaway kept Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg waiting in the hall for a reported 30 minutes, according to former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani on Newsmax.
Buttigieg "doesn't know a damn thing about emergency response," Giuliani told Thursday's "Eric Bolling The Balance" about Buttigieg waiting 20 days before coming to the scene of a train derailment that spewed toxic chemicals into the environment. "This has been going on for two weeks, and he hasn't acted.
"He should have been fired by now. If he worked for me as a commissioner of transportation, and he was absent for two weeks, and made a statement like – 'this happens 1,000 times a year' – he'd be looking for a new job now, because he's obviously not up to this one."
Giuliani noted he was invited to East Palestine because of his experience in crisis management, having aided the 9/11 response as the mayor of New York City when the Twin Towers collapsed and there was toxic fallout.
"I'm asked to come to these things," Giuliani told host Eric Bolling, rejecting Buttigieg's claims his critics were there as "political" opportunist. "Today I had a very, very good session with the mayor. I would think a heck of a lot more productive than Mr. Lightweight."
Giuliani said he did not know he was leaving Buttigieg waiting in the hall, but Mayor Conaway was getting more from his expertise than he would have from an unqualified transportation secretary.
"He had a lot more valuable hour and a half with me than with Little Petey there," Giuliani continued. "Little Pete does not know a damn thing about any of this. He makes it up as he goes along. He's a dilettante, which is very, very typical of a liberal, and they don't know how to manage, because they're completely unrealistic.
"The whole administration is filled with it, while our country is horribly mismanaged."
Explaining the "unrealistic" criticism, Giuliani said it is the "childish, unrealistic philosophy that money grows on trees, that you really don't need experience, that equity means that everybody gets the same result."
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Eric Mack ✉
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
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