ANALYSIS — President Donald Trump largely blamed — without evidence — the deadly collision of an Army Blackhawk helicopter and a passenger airliner near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport on Democratic officials, contending Thursday that fault lay with their push for greater diversity among air traffic controllers.
The often-bombastic president began a hastily announced appearance in the White House briefing room, his first in over four years, very much in the role of consoler in chief as crews worked to manage the wreckage of the Sikorsky H-60 aircraft and American Eagle Flight 5342, which left no survivors, the president said.
“I speak to you this morning in an hour of anguish for our nation. … We take solace in the knowledge that their journey ended, not in the cold waters of the Potomac, but in the warm embrace of a loving God,” Trump said of the victims of the tragedy. “We do not know what led to this crash, but we have some very strong opinions and ideas, and I think we’ll probably state those opinions now.”
And that’s what he did, turning what one senior Democratic senator said should have been a solemn day into a broadside attack on the opposition party and its push for diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI. Trump and his campaign aides have said that the Biden administration’s DEI hiring policies helped him secure a second term.
“I do want to point out that various articles that appeared prior to my entering office, and here’s one, the FAA’s diversity push includes a focus on hiring people with severe intellectual and psychiatric disabilities,” Trump claimed. “That is amazing. And then it says FAA says people with severe disabilities are the most underrepresented segment of the workforce, and … they can be air traffic controllers.”
“I don’t think so,” he said, appearing to veer in and out of campaign mode, all while emergency personnel scrambled to recover bodies from the frigid Potomac River and family members waited to hear the worst.
Yet, later during the midday briefing, Trump was pressed on what evidence he had that the former administration’s DEI hiring standards had contributed to the crash. The president, who has uttered, according to independent fact-checkers, thousands of false statements, admitted he had none.
“It just could have been,” Trump said, knocking former Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden by claiming he had increased Obama-era standards for air traffic controllers only to have Biden lower them. He again provided no specifics.
Trump also singled out Biden’s Transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg, for blame.
“That guy is a real winner. Do you know how badly everything’s run since he’s run this Department of Transportation?” he claimed.
“Despicable,” Buttigieg responded shortly on social media, saying it was time for the president “to show actual leadership.”
“As families grieve, Trump should be leading, not lying. 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. President Trump now oversees the military and the FAA. One of his first acts was to fire and suspend some of the key personnel who helped keep our skies safe,” the former secretary contended.
Later Thursday afternoon, at a signing event in the Oval Office, Trump appeared to trying hedge on his earlier remarks.
Asked by a reporter if he truly thought race or gender was to blame for the National Airport crash, the president replied: “It may have. I don’t know. Incompetence might have played a role. … We’ll let you know that.”
Military miscue?
On his 10th full day back in office, Trump said at the news conference that his administration would “set the highest possible bar for aviation safety.”
“We have to have our smartest people. It doesn’t matter what they look like, how they speak, who they are,” he said, echoing more campaign rhetoric that Democrats have said is discriminatory at best and racist at worst.
Laying out his hiring standards for such federal positions, Trump said: “It matters, intellect, talent, the word talent. You have to be talented, naturally talented geniuses. You can’t have regular people doing that job.”
(Left unsaid was the cost of hiring such workers, at high taxpayer-funded wages comparable to the private sector.)
Trump also pointed blame at the Army crew piloting the chopper, contending that the airline pilot was “doing everything right” and “for some reason, you had a helicopter that was at the same height, obviously, when they hit, but pretty much the same height and going at an angle that was unbelievably bad.”
It was a rare break with a military that the 47th commander in chief has long praised, courted for votes over three presidential runs and vowed to “rebuild” after two Democratic administrations.
“I have helicopters. You can stop a helicopter very quickly. It had the ability to go up or down. It had the ability to turn, and the turn it made was not the correct, obviously, and it did somewhat the opposite of what it was told,” he contended only hours after a National Transportation Safety Board-led investigation was announced.
“For some reason, [the chopper] just kept going, and then it made a slight turn at the very end,” he later added. “By that time, it was too late.”
‘Cutting it way back’
The tragic midair collision provided an early test for a second-term president who returned to office claiming he was intent on shrinking the very federal government that must investigate and clean up the crash — and who has to implement potentially costly steps to avoid a repeat.
“I can just tell you [the] government is doing very well. And we’re cutting way back,” Trump said Wednesday during a bill-signing event at the White House when asked about his ongoing review of federal aid spending.
The Trump administration is moving ahead with an assessment of federal programs related to grants and loans, vowing to trim government spending. “Still freezing money,” a White House official said Wednesday while confirming that a related Office of Management and Budget memo that caused widespread confusion about the availability of funding had been rescinded.
After the military helicopter slammed into the American Eagle flight on final approach to the runway, however, the Trump administration must embark on what will be a costly investigation and cleanup effort.
Trump’s initial assessment, posted on his Truth Social platform, was to pin blame on the crew of the Army helicopter and National Airport’s air traffic control team.
“The airplane was on a perfect and routine line of approach to the airport. The helicopter was going straight at the airplane for an extended period of time. It is a CLEAR NIGHT, the lights on the plane were blazing, why didn’t the helicopter go up or down, or turn,” he posted Thursday at 12:19 a.m. Eastern time. “Why didn’t the control tower tell the helicopter what to do instead of asking if they saw the plane. This is a bad situation that looks like it should have been prevented. NOT GOOD!!!”
That appeared to contradict what his new Transportation secretary, Sean P. Duffy, said a few hours later during a morning news conference at the airport. Duffy assessed that “the helicopter was in a standard pattern,” adding that the airliner was also in a “standard flight pattern as it was coming into DCA. So this was not unusual.”
Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia, where National Airport is located, said at the same news conference that Thursday should be a day for “sorrow, thanks and questions.”
“So sorrow, as all have expressed to the crew, to the passengers, to the soldiers, to their families, to their friends, to their loved ones, to people who are still trying to get information and unsure whether their loved ones have been lost, we offer our profound condolences to them … for this tragedy,” Kaine said.
The former Virginia governor appeared in no mood for talk of cuts to the federal agencies that will lead and assist in the investigation, recovery mission, subsequent cleanup — and implementing any needed changes in the crowded airspace.
Kaine told reporters it was “not a time to speculate, it’s a time to investigate and get answers to the questions we need.”
He spoke of the “appreciation and pride” in seeing people from agencies across all levels of government working together in the midst of a tragedy.
“And then finally, questions. They’re going to be a lot of questions, obviously a lot of questions, and that’s what the NTSB’s job is, is to be an independent investigator of incidents like this, and they are here,” Kaine said.
Democratic Rep. Donald S. Beyer Jr., whose Virginia district includes National Airport, called for a robust federal response, saying during the same news conference, “We’ve got to make sure that at the federal level — and with the support of Virginia and Maryland, D.C. — we’re doing everything we can to make sure this does not happen again.”
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