Good morning!
Diversity and inclusion policies have been accused of all kinds of things over the past few years, but yesterday the blame game reached a new level when President Donald Trump said, without any evidence, that DEI contributed to the tragic air crash in Washington, D.C.
On Wednesday night, an American Airlines flight from Wichita, Kansas, carrying 60 passengers and four crew members collided midair with an Army helicopter near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport in D.C. While recovery efforts are still underway, the White House announced earlier that there are no survivors. It’s the deadliest plane crash in the U.S. since November 2001.
During a press briefing, Trump pointed fingers at the Federal Aviation Administration’s “diversity push,” which he claimed “includes focus on hiring people with severe intellectual and psychiatric disabilities.” When questioned about how he came to that conclusion, Trump replied: “Because I have common sense, OK? And unfortunately, a lot of people don’t.”
The latest accusation illustrates how the new administration and its supporters incorporate DEI into any conversation: by signaling it as a possible cause of catastrophe, regardless of evidence. And it’s happened before.
After the Trump assassination attempt at a rally in Pennsylvania last year, Tennessee Congressman Tim Burchett called Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle a “DEI hire.” And during the Los Angeles wildfires earlier this year, billionaire Trump ally Elon Musk shared a four-year-old “racial equity action plan” from the L.A. Fire Department, claiming without evidence that firefighters “prioritized DEI over saving lives and homes."
In response to the crash in Washington D.C. this week, Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy said during a briefing that the midair collision “shouldn’t have happened” and that the Department of Transportation and the FAA will “make sure we have the reforms that have been dictated by President Trump in place to make sure that these mistakes do not happen again and again.”
Meanwhile, the former Secretary of Transportation under Biden, Pete Buttigieg, took Trump to task for his comments in a Thursday post on X. “As families grieve, Trump should be leading, not lying,” he wrote. “We put safety first, drove down close calls, grew Air Traffic Control, and had zero commercial airline crash fatalities out of millions of flights on our watch.”
More details will emerge about the devastating air crash over the next few weeks and months. But the trend of blaming DEI without evidence for various disasters is likely to last much longer than that.
Brit Morse
brit.morse@fortune.com
