WATCH: White House Reporters Asked Trump Spox About Fatal Train Derailment Exactly Once — Here’s How That Went
During former President Donald Trump’s time in office, White House reporters asked about a train derailment on one occasion according to a review of transcripts.
White House reporters have been bombarding White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre and President Joe Biden with criticism and intense pressure for him to visit the site of the train disaster in East Palestine, Ohio.
As Fox News has pointed out, Trump did not visit any of the train disaster sites that occurred during his presidency — but as it turns out, he was never asked to. In fact, the subject of a deadly train derailment only came up once.
On December 18, 2017, an Amtrak passenger train derailed near DuPont, Washington State, killing three people and injuring 65 others. When the subject came up at the next day’s White House briefing, then-Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was asked exactly one question about the crash — as it turns out, a prescient one — and spent 12 seconds answering it:
Q Thanks, Sarah. Early reports are indicating that that fatal Amtrak derailment out in Washington — similar to the 2015 derailment in Philadelphia — could have been prevented by positive train control, which Congress back in ’08 mandated was supposed to be on all lines by 2015. That’s been pushed back and it’s only on a quarter of passenger lines right now. Is this White House considering any steps to speed up the implementation of positive train control to stop these kinds of accidents?
MS. SANDERS: Right now we’re continuing to review and investigate exactly what took place yesterday. And once we have more detailed determination on that, we can take steps to prevent things like this from happening in the future.
Trump spoke about the fatal crash once, for a total of 23 seconds, and did not visit the site or send his transportation secretary:
Let me begin by expressing our deepest sympathies and most heartfelt prayers for the victims of the train derailment in Washington State. We are closely monitoring the situation and coordinating with local authorities. It is all the more reason why we must start immediately fixing the infrastructure of the United States.
A little more than five years later, those comments from Sanders and Trump have come into sharper relief. Trump never did get his infrastructure plan going, and in 2019 killed a raft of train safety regulations that included the one referenced by that reporter.
Watch above via Trump White House Archive.
