According to reality TV star Donald Trump, circa 2013, there's only one person to blame for the Washington DC air disaster that killed 67 people this week.
As President in 2018, Trump used that same "whatever happens, you're responsible" logic to take credit for "zero deaths" in Commercial Aviation the previous year.
When things are going well, Trump wants you to know it's because he's a big strong man with an abnormally large brain and he worked really hard to get it done, even if it appeared he was mostly golfing.
America's deadliest air crash since November 2001
This week, however, when 67 people died in a crash over the Potomac River involving an American Eagle flight from Kansas and an Army helicopter, President "Whatever Happens, You're Responsible" Trump was singing a different tune.
As the headline in Newsweek summed it up: "Donald Trump Blames Obama, Biden, DEI for DC Plane Crash."
That was not only bonkers. It was also, as Pete Buttigieg tweeted, "Despicable."
As CNN reported from Trump's flashback-inducing press conference:
At one point, Trump read from a 2024 New York Post article that said the FAA was “actively recruiting workers who suffer ‘severe intellectual’ disabilities, psychiatric problems and other mental and physical conditions under a diversity and inclusion hiring initiative spelled out on the agency’s website.” And after reading out part of a 2024 Fox News article on the same subject, Trump said, “This was (on) January 14, so that was a week before I entered office; they put a big push to put diversity into the FAA’s program.”
It's not always clear when Trump is lying on purpose or when his big brain is not working at full capacity. But for the record, 14 January 2024 was not one week before 20 January 2025.
Blaming Obama doesn't work. Nor does blaming Biden
As Snopes reported in January 2024, the text about "‘severe intellectual’ disabilities, psychiatric problems and other mental and physical conditions" has been included on the FAA's website since February 2013. It wasn't suddenly created in January 2024:
It was present during the entirety of the Trump administration.
It was present for nearly 11 years before Elon Musk and "some smart people" he knows got tricked into thinking it was something brand new.
It was, of course, also present when Trump was taking credit for zero air fatalities in 2017.
So blaming DEI won't work either.
Especially because DEI "doesn't apply to air traffic controllers."
Trump could have tried blaming Elon Musk
When the deadliest US plane crash since 2001 occurred on January 29, the Federal Aviation Administration was leaderless, after former chief Michael Whitaker was hounded out his job by Elon Musk.
Whitaker's job had become "exceedingly challenging," writes Jeffrey Kluger in TIME:
Since a dust-up last September with SpaceX boss and presidential pal Elon Musk led to Musk taking to X and calling for Whitaker to quit his post. “He needs to resign,” Musk posted flatly on Sept. 25, 2024....
The post came just over a week after Musk blamed the FAA for nothing short of stifling the dreams of the human race as a whole. “The fundamental problem,” he posted on Sept. 17, “is that humanity will forever be confined to Earth unless there is radical reform at the FAA!”
What Elon Musk sees as "stifling the dreams of the human race" is what others (such as FAA Chief Counsel Marc Nichols) might call "the safety oversight of companies with commercial space transportation licenses."
Musk's fury at the Whitaker-led FAA came after he had been handed fines totaling $633,000 for safety violations including... (checks notes)... illegally launching his famously explosion-prone rockets.
The FAA's safety concerns about SpaceX were proven correct on January 16 when Elon's Starship rocket exploded minutes after launching from Texas, "forcing airline flights over the Gulf of Mexico to alter course to avoid falling debris."
In other countries, a businessman with a history of putting personal interest over public safety, who had recently been caught illegally launching space rockets, and who then caused a dangerous rocket explosion close to commercial flight routes might have expected his wings to get a little clipped.
But this is America, goddammit!
So four days after the explosion, Musk was co-president and Whitaker—the official best qualified to lead the investigation into the Texas disaster—was out of a job.
But maybe Trump has no one to blame but himself
The deadliest US air crash since 2001 occurred just one week after Trump issued a January 22 "Fact Sheet" promising to "end DEI madness" and "restore excellence and safety within the Federal Aviation Administration."
The Fact Sheet also stated that "FLIGHTS SHOULD BE SUPERVISED BY THE BEST EMPLOYEES" and that "Safety and competence should be the only job criteria for FAA employees."
Despite Trump's colorful promises to put safety first, air traffic control at Reagan Airport Tower was understaffed at the time of the crash. And Trump took no steps to actually replace FAA administrator Whitaker until after the crash, when he hurriedly did so.
Trump's "Fact Sheet" also made the non-factual claim that "The Biden FAA specifically recruited and hired individuals with 'severe intellectual' disabilities, psychiatric issues, and complete paralysis over other individuals who sought to work for the FAA," without noting that the policy being inaccurately described had been the same throughout Trump's first term.
As the American Association of People with Disabilities noted, "employees with disabilities" did not cause the crash.
One day before issuing his "Fact Sheet," Trump had also fired the heads of the TSA and the Coast Guard, and eliminated all the members of the Aviation Security Advisory Committee which, reported AP, "was mandated by Congress after the 1988 PanAm 103 bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland." With no current members, the committee currently exists in name only.
Eight days before the crash, Stephanie Bernstein, whose husband was killed in the bombing and served on the committee, told the AP:
“I naively thought, ‘oh they’re not going to do anything in the new administration, to put security at risk — aviation security at risk.’ But I’m not so sure."
The other aircraft in the crash was, of course, an Army helicopter that was half a mile off course and at a higher-than-approved altitude.
The fact that the UH-60 Black Hawk was under the ultimate command of Trump's new Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth led some on social media to ask whether it was not "DEI," but "DUI" hiring that was the problem.
Ultimately, though, Substack's Jim Acosta summed it up best on X.
Acosta is right. This is not a time for shameful finger pointing.
It's a time when we need a President with enough empathy to console the families and enough credibility to carry out a thorough and transparent investigation.
And wouldn't it also be nice to have a President who was man enough to admit "the buck stops here"?
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P.S. This really is the time to get off X once and for all. Please find me on Bluesky and these other places.
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