In the wake of the early February disaster that was a train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, Joe Biden’s administration ignored the entire event for weeks until they no longer could.

Pete Buttigieg has been absolutely useless on this issue, as well as any issue related to his job. He has even gone so far as to downplay the event as just one of many that happen every year, because he’s got to deflect all criticism away from his own failures.

Biden has been pretty much silent on the issue. He has not really addressed it in any significant way, and then it even came out that his administration denied FEMA funding to East Palestine. Clearly, his administration needed to do something with all the negative criticism, so he took a surprise trip… to Ukraine.

That trip was seen as a slap in the face by the people of Ohio, many of whom are too afraid to return home after the train crash. With viral videos showing chemicals still in the water, among other Internet sensations, East Palestine may technically be habitable, but people sure don’t seem to believe it.

Again, perception matters, and the perception this puts off is that the president is far more concerned about rebuilding Ukraine than he is about helping American citizens who have found themselves with poisoned groundwater. And to be sure, Biden has made plenty of trips inside the US in the past for far less nationally relevant issues. In this case, it sure seems like he just doesn’t care about Americans in red states.

What would go a long way to helping, though, is reassurance from the President on that front, but he has so far been silent on the issue. What’s more, not even his wife seems eager to take a trip to the disaster area. She will, instead, play diplomatic envoy to African nations.

Jill Biden will visit Namibia and Kenya this week as part of a push by the United States to step up engagement with Africa as a counterweight to China’s influence on the continent, the White House announced Tuesday.

President Joe Biden told African leaders who came to Washington for a summit last year that the U.S. is “all in” on the continent’s future. He also announced that he, his wife, the vice president and several members of his Cabinet would travel to Africa this year, and joked that the leaders would get tired of hosting everyone.

Sure this is an important diplomatic trip, and it’s always important to build relations with these countries, but the fact that neither Joe nor Jill has set foot inside Ohio since the train incident says a lot about the Biden administration’s policies. As I mentioned earlier today, they are concerned with Ukraine and environmentalism. Everything else can take a back seat.

Including suffering Americans.