Peduto rebukes Trump over Pittsburgh reference
When Bill Peduto campaigned this spring for re-election, he banked on Pittsburghers’ distaste for the president. The mayor aired a 30-second TV spot that knocked Donald Trump over health care and education, even calling him a New England Patriots fan.
“And I was elected with nearly 70 percent of the vote,” Mr. Peduto said Thursday evening, swiping again at the White House after Mr. Trump referred to Pittsburgh in an announcement withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement. “This city does not support the initiatives that he is doing. This city is adamantly opposed to them.
“For him to use this city as his example of who he is elected to represent — he’s not representing us at all, or not very well,” the mayor added, addressing reporters in his Downtown office.
About two hours earlier, Mr. Trump said in his announcement that he “was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris.” Asked why the remarks featured the Steel City, a White House spokeswoman told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that the speech “was the culmination of a longstanding campaign promise.”
“The people of Pittsburgh, like other hardworking American families across the country, are the people he is fighting for and who know that in this administration America comes first,” the spokeswoman said in a statement.
Mr. Peduto, a Democrat, said he took personal offense to the Pittsburgh reference, which he cast as “really sloppy speech writing.”
“In his speechwriter’s mind, Pittsburgh is this dirty old town that relies upon big coal and big steel to survive,” the mayor said. He said the text “completely ignores the sacrifices that we made over 30 years in order to get back up on our feet, in order to be creating a new economy, in order to make the sacrifices to clean our air and clean our water.”
The remarks “used us as this example of a stereotype in order to make a point — and it missed completely,” Mr. Peduto said.
He pledged that Pittsburgh will keep following the principles of the nonbinding Paris accord, which aims to slow global warming. His administration will issue an executive order Friday to guide the city through the Paris measures and its own environmental goals, including for carbon emissions and renewable energy.
Pittsburgh already plans to reduce its carbon emissions 20 percent by 2023.
“We will fall in line with other criteria of the Paris Agreement, and I can assure you that more than 100 other cities across America will do the same,” Mr. Peduto said.
By 9 p.m. Thursday, more than 65 U.S. mayors — including Mr. Peduto — had signed a pledge to uphold commitments in the Paris accord.
“We will increase our efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions, create a clean energy economy, and stand for environmental justice,” the pledge reads in part.
Mr. Peduto, whose media appearances late Thursday included CNN and MSNBC, said he was part of a historic gathering of more than 500 mayors in Paris. He said implementing the environmental objectives established there in 2015 falls largely to city leaders.
His Twitter responses to Mr. Trump, a Republican, stirred a vigorous response, having been shared more than 100,000 times by Thursday night.
The president “didn’t come anywhere close to winning Pittsburgh,” Mr. Peduto said, echoing his commentary on social media. “If he would’ve said Fayette County, or he would’ve said Greene County — yeah, sure. But what he said was Pittsburgh, and the people of Pittsburgh voted for Hillary Rodham Clinton — 80 percent.”
General election returns showed Ms. Clinton with just more than 78 percent of the city’s vote last year, but she fared worse elsewhere in Allegheny County. She won the county overall by 16 percentage points, and a majority of voters in each neighboring county supported Mr. Trump.
Dave Majernik, vice chairman for the Republican Committee of Allegheny County, called Mr. Peduto’s response “part of of a well-orchestrated assault on President Trump by partisan Democrats.”
“Technically, it might be accurate” that Ms. Clinton carried Pittsburgh, Mr. Majernik said. “But we’re all Pittsburghers in this area. That’s what I think [Mr. Trump] was referring to. He also was referring to Pittsburgh [representing] oldtime cities that were once great industrial centers and now have fallen on bad times.”
Staff writers Don Hopey and Dan Majors contributed. Adam Smeltz: 412-263-2625.