(NEW YORK) — Here are the scores from Sunday’s sports events:
INTERLEAGUE
Pittsburgh 5, Minnesota 2
Houston 6, Washington 2
Boston 4, Miami 1
NY Yankees 10, Atlanta 6
Toronto 16, Philadelphia 4
Kansas City 5, San Francisco 1
Seattle 6, Milwaukee 1
Arizona 6, Cleveland 4
LA Dodgers 8, Chicago White Sox 4
LA Angels 8, Cincinnati 5
San Diego 10, Oakland 3
Cincinnati 12, Oakland 4
AMERICAN LEAGUE
Baltimore 5, Tampa Bay 2
Minnesota 6, Detroit 2
Texas 7, LA Angels 5
NATIONAL LEAGUE
NY Mets 7, St. Louis 1
Chicago Cubs 6, Colorado 5
NATIONAL BASKETBALL ASSOCIATION
Phoenix 130, Dallas 126
Indiana 125, Chicago 122
LA Lakers 113, Golden State 105
Brooklyn 102, Charlotte 86
Portland 122, Orlando 119
Houston 142, San Antonio 110
Oklahoma City 129, Utah 119
Milwaukee 117, Washington 111
New York 131, Boston 129 (2OT)
LA Clippers 135, Memphis 129
NATIONAL HOCKEY LEAGUE
Carolina 6, Tampa Bay 0
Vegas 4, Montreal 3
Philadelphia 3, Detroit 1
New Jersey 5, Arizona 4 (OT)
Seattle 3, Colorado 2 (OT)
TOP-25 COLLEGE BASKETBALL
(1)Houston 67, Memphis 65
(5)Purdue 76, Illinois 71
(15)Indiana 75, Michigan 73
Penn St. 65, (21)Maryland 64
Dan + Shay‘s follow-up to 2021’s Good Things is shaping up to be even better things.
That’s because last year, Dan Smyers and Shay Mooney decided to go back to their beginnings as they celebrated a career milestone.
“We’ve been together for 10 years, been able to, like, live out our dreams, all this cool stuff,” Dan tells ABC Audio. “Like aren’t we the luckiest guys in the world? And [we] kinda sat back down and just got a guitar like we did when we first met. And we hit this creative stride.”
That included setting the bar high when it came to writing songs.
“We kinda set a goal,” Dan continues. “We’re like, ‘We’re gonna write 50 songs this year’ — which, like, doesn’t seem like that many for just songwriters in Nashville. We’ve got people writing 150 songs, 200 songs.”
“But with how busy we are,” he explains, “it was, like, a manageable goal. And we did, and we just blew past that. And I feel like we wrote our best material of our career so far.”
Dan + Shay currently have a top 20 hit with “You,” the latest single off Good Things.
Mel Brooks fans have been waiting over 40 years for this — the sequel to History of the World Part 1. Part 2 starts streaming Monday on Hulu.
It’s a series this time around, with Wanda Sykes, Ike Barinholtz, and Nick Kroll as executive producers, with some help from Brooks himself, Barinholtz tells ABC Audio.
“He’s a national treasure who’s 96, and we want to make sure that we’re not making him too exhausted. But he would always be there to jump on a zoom and hear a pitch or do a table read. And he’s in the show,” he explains. “…And every time you see him, to quote Wanda, his face pop up on your screen you’re just like, you look around like, is anyone else watching this? Like, this is crazy.”
Barinholtz says Brooks was one of the biggest influences on his young comedy brain, crediting the comedy legend for introducing him to the R-rated comedies he’s grown to love.
“It was because of Mel in the ’70s that I watched movies in the ’80s that weren’t not just Mel’s, but also Trading Places and Vacation and Coming to America and then in the ’90s with the Farrelly brothers and then in the 2000s with… movies like Bridesmaids and Anchorman and stuff,” he recalls. “…And Mel started that s***.”
Sykes agrees, noting, “Blazing Saddles was like my favorite movie, watched it so many times.”
“I think what, Mel teaches us is that you can be hella silly and you can also be crass, but you can also say something,” she continues. “You know, I love how he went after whoever was in charge. He was always bringing down the big guy.”
At the Oscars on March 12, legendary songwriter Diane Warren has received her 14th nomination for Best Original Song for “Applause,” from the movie Tell It Like a Woman. but while she feels the nomination is its own award, she wouldn’t mind taking home the Oscar — to keep one of her other awards company.
“I already won,” she tells ABC Audio. “[My song was] already chosen to be one of five songs chosen by the best musicians, best composers, best songwriters in music and the planet.” She adds, “Whatever happens after that happens, but what a great feeling and what a great sign of respect.”
And even though last year Diane became the first-ever songwriter in Academy history to receive the honorary Governors Award — which she calls “the big Oscar they give to, like, Orson Welles or Walt Disney” — she wants a “regular” Oscar too.
“I’d still like to win a competitive Oscar….[because] he gets very lonely,” she laughs. “He just sits there on my piano. He wants a friend!”
On the Oscar telecast Sunday on ABC, Diane will play the piano while singer/actress Sofia Carson sings “Applause.” Diane says Sofia was the perfect person to record the empowering tune because “she’s beautiful inside, and it comes out in her voice.”
In addition, Diane says Sofia is “strong,” and reveals that “record executives have told her, ‘You gotta take your clothes off’…and she’s like, ‘No, I’m doing it on my terms.’ And you know what? Look at her. She is! She’s going to be on the Academy Awards!”
Oscars aside “Applause” is also climbing the chart, so which would Diane prefer: to win on Sunday, or to see “Applause” hit number one?
“Why can’t I have both?” she laughs. “Why do you gotta choose?”
Foreigner is set to kick off their final tour this summer. While some may question whether it’s the right time for them to say goodbye to the road, the band’s current lead singer, Kelly Hansen, thinks the timing’s perfect.
“I’d rather go out at the top of our game than to be out there doing it less than it should be, as I’ve seen so many times over the years,” he tells ABC Audio. “Sometimes I’ll just see someone and I’ll just kinda go, ‘Why, why are they — is it too many divorces? Why are they still out there?’”
And the tour should certainly be a fun one for longtime fans, with Hansen noting, “I would like to be able to play some stuff that we really don’t get to play.” He says it will all depend on how long the show is, curfews and things like that.
But Kelly hints that fans may see a special guest here and there.
“All of the original Foreigner members are always welcome to join us and I know that will be taking place,” he says. “And who knows? Who knows in the musical world who might feel like it’s a good time to come and say hi with us onstage who might have been fans and never really told us. Who knows? But it should be good.”
Foreigner’s farewell tour kicks off July 6 in Atlanta, Georgia, and is currently set to wrap up September 3 in Holmdel, New Jersey. A complete list of dates can be found at foreigneronline.com.
Gary Rossington, guitarist for Southern rock legends Lynyrd Skynyrd, passed away Sunday at the age of 71, according to an announcement on the band’s Facebook page.
“It is with our deepest sympathy and sadness that we have to advise, that we lost our brother, friend, family member, songwriter and guitarist, Gary Rossington, today,” the band shared. “Gary is now with his Skynyrd brothers and family in heaven and playing it pretty, like he always does.”
The statement added, “Please keep [his wife] Dale, [his daughters] Mary [and] Annie and the entire Rossington family in your prayers and respect the family’s privacy at this difficult time.”
Rossington, who was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with the band in 2006, was the last original member of Skynyrd’s lineup remaining in the group. He had been the last surviving original member of the band, following the death of Larry Junstrom in 2019.
He played guitar on many of the band’s biggest hits, including “Simple Man,” which he co-wrote with Ronnie Van Zant, as well as “Sweet Home Alabama” — which he also co-wrote — and “Tuesday’s Gone.” He played slide guitar on Lynyrd Skynyrd’s signature “Free Bird.”
Rossington was one of the passengers who survived the October, 20, 1977 Mississippi plane crash that took the lives of Lynyrd Skynyrd members Ronnie Van Zant, Steve Gaines and Cassie Gaines and three others, though he broke both arms, legs, wrists, and ankles, in addition to his pelvis.
Outside of Lynyrd Skynyrd, Rossington, along with Skynyrd member Allen Collins, formed the Rossington Collins Band, which released two albums in 1980 and 1981 before disbanding in 1982. He also formed TheRossington Band with his wife Dale Krantz; they released two albums in 1986 and 1988.
(CONWAY, Ark.) — It’s been more than 45 days since 14-year-old Tanvi Marupally went missing near the bus pickup area at her school in Conway, Arkansas, and there are still no publicly known leads as to where she went.
Tanvi’s parents initially told the Conway Police Department that the Indian-American teenager might have run away from home due to fear of deportation, according to police. She had run away previously at age 11 when her mother was deported, but in that instance, she was gone less than a day and was near her house for the entirety of her disappearance, officials said.
Her parents, Sridevi Eadara and Pavan Roy Marupally, have said deportation is no longer a concern. The couple expressed this assurance in a video posted to YouTube of them pleading for their only daughter to come home. Eadara, the mother, returned legally to the United States as a dependent on her husband’s visa, she told ABC News.
Eadara told ABC News that while transitioning to junior high this school year was stressful for her daughter, “she’s smart, hardworking, kindhearted, and always wanted to help people, especially in high school … all of her teachers are so proud of her.”
She also said that between Tanvi’s excitement for college and the ACT she was scheduled to take in February, it makes no sense that she’d run away.
According to CPD, Tanvi was last seen walking past her usual bus pickup area at Conway Junior High School on Jan. 17, 2023. When she did not arrive home by bus later that day, her parents contacted the police. She was not carrying any sort of trackable electronic device.
The community of approximately 65,000 people has rallied around her family and the cause to bring Tanvi home, searching the town for weeks, holding a vigil in February, and bringing home-cooked meals to Tanvi’s parents.
“You wish every community with a missing child would respond the way Conway has,” Rebecca Steinbach, spokesperson for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), told ABC News. “They’ve banded together in such a loving, positive way to bring Tanvi home.”
Eadara said, “Our family, friends and community … they are helping us … literally they are taking care of my family.”
But Steinbach fears awareness of the case has not sufficiently reached beyond the small town. She hopes NCMEC’s latest effort will spread the word further.
“Tanvi’s face will be on TV screens at gas pumps throughout the state of Arkansas and surrounding states of Texas, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Missouri over the next month,” she said. NCMEC also has a dedicated case manager working in conjunction with law enforcement and the family to offer resources and assistance daily, according to the spokesperson.
In February, the U.S. Marshals Service joined CPD in its efforts to search for the teen. But despite a multi-agency effort, the case appears to be running cold, leading some community members to criticize law enforcement’s response and begin their own sleuthing efforts.
Jenny Wallace is a lifelong resident of the Conway area, former teacher, and mom of six who organized the vigil in February and continues to advocate for more resources dedicated to finding Tanvi, as are other local parents. Tanvi’s mother confirmed Wallace has grown close to their family since her daughter’s disappearance.
Wallace told ABC News that she believes in the crucial period of the first two weeks of the case, CPD failed to address the teen’s disappearance adequately. Arkansas State Police confirmed neither an AMBER Alert nor Endangered Missing Advisory were sent out in January, which Wallace claimed she begged the police for.
In an email to ABC News on Thursday, CPD public information officer Lacey Kanipe said they were in contact with Arkansas State Police regarding issuance of an AMBER Alert, since that agency decides what cases qualify for alerts but added, “While ASP is sympathetic, ultimately, they determined that the information we have at this time does not meet the requirement for an Amber Alert.” In an email to ABC News, ASP stated, “Based on the information provided by the Conway PD on Feb. 17, the case did not meet the ASP requirement for an Amber Alert.” “We did not receive a call before Feb. 17,” they continued, which was a month after Tanvi went missing.
For cases to qualify for an AMBER Alert, the U.S. Justice Department requires specific criteria be met, including that there must be a reasonable belief by law enforcement that an abduction has occurred, and law enforcement must believe the child is in imminent danger of serious bodily injury or death. An EMA alert, according to ASP’s alert guidelines, can be used when law enforcement has a case that does not fully qualify for an AMBER Alert. Neither CPD nor ASP responded to inquiries as to why an EMA was not issued.
The offense description box of the January 2023 police report reviewed by ABC News labels Tanvi’s disappearance as “harassment conduct that repeatedly causes alarm,” not “runaway” or “missing person,” but the narrative section of her report states that a BOLO was sent out and she was registered into ASP’s Crime Information Center as a runaway.
In an email to ABC News, Kanipe stated: “Typically when juveniles run away the incident is categorized as harassment.”
Kanipe did not respond to requests to explain “harassment” and why it is applied to missing children.
“Initially, we reported Tanvi as wearing tan pants based on a description given to us by her parents,” Kanipe said. “We later realized that Tanvi’s parents were mistaken when we received footage from the school district, and we put out an accurate release with photos from the day Tanvi left school.”
“I think they [police] felt like this was a runaway who was going to come home and that’s how it was treated. And so we applied pressure at two weeks … and then they started canvassing,” Wallace said of her experience. “I would say more stuff is being done [by police] now,” she added. But over a month into the case, law enforcement has not informed the public of any leads.
In reply to criticism that CPD’s response to Marupally’s case has been insufficient, CPD listed its efforts, ranging from park, town, and sewage canvasses by foot and drone, interviews with those who knew Tanvi, and surveillance footage requests. “CPD began our search for Tanvi as soon as her parents notified us that she did not come home from school…,” Kanipe wrote.
“Our concern lies with Tanvi’s family and ensuring that we remain in communication with them about any updates on the investigation,” Kanipe wrote.
Nevertheless, because of Wallace’s dissatisfaction with law enforcement’s response, she says she took matters into her own hands in those first two weeks, orchestrating her own searches in the area and reviewing door camera footage from the area where Marupally went missing. She was also pleased when the family hired a private investigator.
Eadara, meanwhile, simply had a message for anyone who may have taken Tanvi and for her daughter. “I’m begging, please let Tanvi go home,” she said. “And Tanvi, please understand your mother’s pain, and let us know you’re safe.”
Officials ask that anyone with information on Tanvi’s whereabouts call 911 or the Conway Police Department at 501-450-6120.
The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children is also taking calls and texts at 1-800-843-5678. Information can be reported anonymously.
(NEW YORK) — Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman, a graduate student studying economics and public policy at Harvard Kennedy School, who is Black, said she never would have entered the field if she hadn’t met Lisa Cook.
In 2017, then an undergraduate math major with little familiarity with economics, Opoku-Agyeman attended a seminar led by Cook, also Black, who at the time was an economics professor at Michigan State University.
“She was wonderful,” Opoku-Agyeman told ABC News. “I walked up to her and said, ‘Hey, can you be my mentor?'”
After graduation, Opoku-Agyeman spent a summer studying at Michigan State, where the relationship with Cook deepened from a formal mentorship to a friendship.
“She has looked out for me in this space,” Opoku-Agyeman said. ”I don’t think I would be here if she didn’t take me under her wing and usher me through some of the most difficult challenges.”
In May, Cook became a Federal Reserve governor, making her the first Black woman to hold that key position, which helps set central bank policy at a high-stakes moment when policymakers are trying to bring down inflation without causing a recession.
She is one in a series of women recently elevated to senior leadership posts in U.S. economic policymaking, including the appointment last month of Lael Brainard to lead the National Economic Council.
The rise of women at the top of economics shows how far the profession has come from a previous era when few women entered the field, economists told ABC News.
However, women continue to make up a fraction of students in the discipline, who ultimately set the course for its professional ranks; and a severe lack of minority women remains a dire concern, they said.
Esther George, the first woman to become President of the Kansas City Federal Reserve, who stepped down in January, told ABC News that the current group of women atop economic policymaking marks a major accomplishment but more progress awaits.
“It’s great,” she said, later adding: “We’re always looking at who’s graduating out of school with Ph.D.’s in economics, and notice right away there are fewer women, fewer still people of color. It really requires thinking about why that is.”
In all, two of the top three economic policymaking posts in the Biden administration are currently occupied by women, including Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen.
This year, a record number of women serve on the boards of the Federal Reserve’s 12 regional banks, a Reuters analysis last month found. Out of 108 spots on the 12 Fed bank boards, 44% are occupied by women, the analysis showed.
By contrast, women hold 28% of board seats on the Russell 3000 index of publicly traded companies, according to a report released in September by the advocacy group 50/50 Women on Boards, which drew on data from research firm Equilar.
The surge of women atop economic policymaking has coincided with a heightened focus on gender diversity at key institutions like the Federal Reserve, a shift driven in large part by women, economists said.
For example, George, the former President of the Kansas City Federal Reserve, helped women colleagues advance their careers through her position as host of a prestigious annual three-day symposium on central bank policy in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.
In 2011, George launched a group called “Women of Jackson Hole” that aimed to improve the representation of women attendees and speakers at the conference.
When she began the initiative, women made up a handful of conference attendees, George said. Last year, nearly 30% of the symposium participants and more than 40 percent of the speakers were women, the symposium said.
“At first, all of us women could sit around a table for five,” George said. “When I left, we had a whole patio.”
“There’s a point at which you realize, and this was true for me: I can’t solve everything, but I ought to solve what I can.”
Stephanie Kelton, an economic professor at Stony Brook University and former economic advisor to the presidential campaigns of Sen. Bernie Sanders, applauded the rise of women at the top of the field but stressed the importance of evaluating them based on how they carry out the job.
“It’s certainly affirming and it’s overdue, and you love to see women succeed in climbing the ranks,” Kelton told ABC News. “But it also matters who these people are and what they’re going to fight for and how they understand the working of the economy.”
Despite progress in representation of women at the top of the field, men far outnumber women at the undergraduate and graduate level, leaving the profession as a whole out of balance, economists said.
Last year, the share of women granted Ph.D. degrees stood at about 34%, slightly lower than it was in 2020; while the proportion of women among undergraduate economics major degree recipients stood at nearly 36%, roughly one percentage point higher than 2020, according to an annual report from the American Economic Association, or AEA.
Women make up less than 18% of full professors in economics departments with doctoral programs, the AEA report found.
In recent years, as the field has reckoned with the lack of overall gender representation in its ranks, prominent women economists have come forward with stories of sexual harassment in the workplace, prompting a #MeToo moment for the profession.
“I fortunately didn’t have any of those kinds of experiences that seem so commonplace within our discipline, and I don’t know if we’re uniquely bad in economics, but it sure seems to be something that needs to be addressed,” Kelton said.
Anne Owen, a professor of economics and public policy at Hamilton College who formerly worked at the Fed, said the lack of women in the field makes it harder for female students to establish a “sense of belonging” that can ease challenges posed by the profession.
“Going to graduate school in economics is very difficult and you have to persevere,” she added. “It might have been easier to find a reason to persevere if there were other women pursuing the same thing I was.”
The disparity in representation is even more pronounced among minority women. In 2016, minority women received 5.1% of all economics degrees conferred that year, an AEA report found.
Opoku-Agyeman, the graduate student at Harvard Kennedy School, said the lack of diversity in economics exposes her to moments of subtle but harmful forms of disrespect, such as people questioning her ability. Further, the status quo leads to policy outcomes that fail to fully consider the perspectives of minority groups, she added.
“We’re not doing ourselves any favors when we have a homogeneous looking group of people overseeing policymaking and how our economy functions,” she said. “Because the policies being enacted are being enacted on folks who don’t look like one group.”
Still, she said she draws encouragement from the rise of women in leadership positions, especially Cook.
(WASHINGTON) — The Equal Rights Amendment was first drafted and introduced in Congress in 1923 — and now, a century later, a bipartisan group of lawmakers is working to at last enshrine its guarantees of gender equality in the Constitution.
“I’m dismayed that in 2023, we still have to fight to be seen as full citizens given the contributions of women as defenders of our democracy and all the contributions that we make to civic life, to culture, to our economy,” Massachusetts Democratic Rep. Ayanna Pressley, who is leading the effort in the House to ratify the ERA, told ABC News in a segment on “This Week” on Sunday.
Congress passed the ERA in 1972 with support from members of both parties, following efforts by leading female legislators like then-New York Rep. Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman in Congress.
The amendment states that “equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex. The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.”
But after passing the House and Senate, the proposed amendment fell short of the three-fourths majority of states — 38 — needed to ratify it before a seven-year deadline set by Congress. Although lawmakers voted to extend the ratification deadline by an additional three years, no new states signed on amid a campaign by conservative activists led by Phyllis Schlafly to stop the amendment.
Schlafly and others argued at the time that rather than extend legal protections for women, the ERA would force them to be treated like men in other ways — such as pushing them into the military draft. Some also said the amendment would expand abortion access, upend child support requirements or encroach on the sex-separation of bathrooms.
“The majority of women simply don’t want it,” Schlafly argued in 1976.
Complicating matters further, five states later voted to rescind their earlier support for the amendment, though such a move has disputed legal value.
The ERA has seen revived public interest in recent years, following the #MeToo movement, women’s marches and the record number of women running and winning seats in Congress.
Nevada voted to ratify the amendment in 2017, Illinois did so in 2018 and it reached the 38-state threshold needed when Virginia voted to do the same in 2020.
On Tuesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled that the congressional deadline on the ERA was legally binding, so the later three ratifications were not valid. Illinois and Nevada sued to demand publication of the measure as the 28th Amendment but failed to show why the deadline that Congress set shouldn’t be enforceable.
Lawmakers and advocates backing the ERA now argue that Congress has the power to lift the deadline because they had the power to impose it in the first place. Pressley told ABC News that it was the “only thing standing in our way.”
“What I think it does is put the ball back in Congress’ court, and that’s where we’ve been playing for quite some time,” said Zakiya Thomas, president and CEO of the ERA Coalition.
Some activists renewed their push to codify the ERA in light of the Supreme Court’s decision last year overruling Roe v. Wade’s national guarantee to abortion access.
“Especially now, it’s important to reintroduce this … in the midst of draconian, very dangerous and targeted attacks against women and the LGBTQ community,” Pressley said. “And really, it’s always time to uplift and to center the humanity and dignity of all people and we need that to be enshrined in the Constitution. I want to vote on this now.”
Last week, the Senate held its first hearing on the ERA in 40 years.
“Here we are, a century after its first introduction, 2023,” said Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Dick Durbin, D-Ill. “It’s time to get the job done. In fact, it’s long overdue.”
The amendment could have real world implications. Jadonna Sanders is a sergeant paramedic with the Washington, D.C., fire department. She has filed a federal lawsuit against the district’s Fire and EMS department alleging gender discrimination and demanding equal pay.
“This is the same story everywhere you go, especially with women who are in a profession such as firefighting, police, you know, where men dominate,” Sanders said.
Officials have pushed back on her claims.
“The department has a long history and a recent history of … hiring women, promoting women,” the department’s chief, John Donnelly, said last year. “Those things seem foreign to me, but we’ll look into them.”
The compensation gap between men and women is just one of several areas that advocates say the ERA would shore up. In 2022, women earned 82 cents on average for every dollar earned by men — a disparity almost unchanged over two decades.
But the battle in Congress is still breaking down along usual party lines.
“The people who are pushing politically to pass this are hanging their head on if it became law, every pro-life measure in this country would fall,” the Senate Judiciary Committee’s ranking Republican member, Lindsey Graham, said during last week’s hearing. Others in the GOP say there is no legislative authority to “revive” the amendment.
Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski is one of few Republicans on board with the ERA, hoping this latest push builds momentum.
“What has happened in the states should not die here in the Senate,” Murkowski said in recent remarks, noting that “we still have a long ways to go when it comes to achieving equality for women.”
In the House, where the Republican majority has declined to take up the bill, Pressley hopes to keep the fight alive.
“It’s long past time,” she told ABC News.
“Equality for all people? Certainly there should be nothing partisan about that.”
(WASHINGTON) — Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg on Sunday had sharp words for the chorus of Republican-led critics to his response to the toxic train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, in February.
In an interview with CNN, Buttigieg offered his most vociferous defense to date, seeking to rebut claims that the Biden administration doesn’t care about the blue-collar town by casting his detractors as the ones truly out of touch.
“It’s really rich to see some of these folks — the former president [Donald Trump], these Fox hosts — who are literally lifelong card-carrying members of the East Coast elite, whose top economic policy priority has always been tax cuts for the wealthy, and who wouldn’t know their way around a T.J. Maxx if their life depended on it, to be presenting themselves as if they genuinely care about the forgotten middle of the country,” Buttigieg said.
The transportation chief, a former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, who also ran for president in 2020, took specific aim at Trump, who visited East Palestine last month.
While in East Palestine, Trump praised local responders and said, “What this community needs now are not excuses … but answers and results.”
Trump also said his trip pressured Buttigieg to subsequently make his own appearance.
“That’s bull—-,” Buttigieg told CNN. “We were already going to go.”
He said it was “somewhat maddening” that Trump would visit East Palestine after easing environmental and rail regulations during his time in the White House “and then show up giving out bottled water and campaign swag.”
Buttigieg has been the target of a fusillade of conservative attacks since last month’s train derailment and concerns over the spread of the noxious chemicals that were on board.
He conceded to CNN that he should have gone to the site of the crash sooner, saying, “Sometimes people need policy work, and sometimes people need performative work. And to get to this level, you’ve got to be ready to serve up both.”
Transportation secretaries do not typically visit train derailments, as some Biden administration supporters have noted. But being there in person was valuable, Buttigieg said: “I think it was important to hear and see how the community was responding, what they were worried about it just a different way that you can sense on paper.”
But Republicans have kept up their scrutiny, which follows past criticism of how the secretary handled issues like Southwest’s holiday season flight meltdowns.
Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., and others have said Buttigieg should resign. Some have personally targeted the first openly gay Cabinet member to be confirmed by the Senate, with attacks on his sexuality.
Donald Trump Jr. insisted that Buttigieg was only tapped for his job because he was “that gay guy,” while Fox News host Tucker Carlson has referred to him as “flamboyantly incompetent” to the point of “evil.”
Buttigieg’s Democratic defenders say those attacks are off base and that while Buttigieg could have made the trip earlier, Republicans are overestimating his ability to ameliorate the issue while using his past presidential bid as low hanging fruit for attacks.
“Maybe they think that because he ran for president, he’s an easy target to hit,” outgoing Labor Secretary Marty Walsh told CNN. “People always say, ‘What’s Secretary Buttigieg going to do next? What’s Buttigieg going to do next?’ We’ve talked. What he’s going to do next is be secretary of transportation.”
