Trump Responds to Washington Plane Crash With Racist, Ableist Diatribe

The president used the tragedy, which killed 67, to deliver a bigoted and self-promoting tirade about DEI.

Donald Trump at a podium in a suit pointing ahead of him.

President Donald Trump takes questions from the press after delivering remarks on the midair collision that occurred last night over the Potomac River.Sipa USA/AP

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On Wednesday, an Army Black Hawk helicopter crashed into a commercial American Airlines flight as it was in the process of landing at Ronald Reagan International Airport in Washington, DC. Officials believe that there were no survivors among the 67 people on both craft.

After tragedies like these, it’s typical for American presidents to address the grieving public. What’s not typical of presidents is to blame issues with, for example, the Federal Aviation Administration on disabled people and people of color. Prior to diving into a bigoted speech at a next-day press conference on the crash, Trump claimed to have “pretty good ideas of what happened,” suggesting disabled people, people of color, Barack Obama, and ex-Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg were to blame for the tragedy.

In his speech, Trump rattled off a long list of the disabilities he said the Biden FAA had allowed air traffic controllers to have—citing, among others, dwarfism—poising hiring them as a negative move. There is nothing to confirm the air traffic controllers, who attempted to intervene at least twice prior to the crash, were even disabled. In addition, disabled people are not hired if they cannot perform the duties of their job.

And he gave himself a pat on the back for his executive order ending equitable hiring processes, issued last week, which claimed that the FAA “specifically recruited and hired individuals with ‘severe intellectual’ disabilities, psychiatric issues, and complete paralysis.” Trump has a history of attacking disabled people and of insulting his political opponents by asserting that they are “mentally disabled.”

Trump then segued to blasting former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, claiming that Buttigieg had run the FAA “right into the ground with his diversity” during his time at the helm. It is unclear whether Trump is referring to Buttigieg’s own sexuality, the FAA pushing for more equitable hiring processes, or the ex-secretary’s groundbreaking rulemaking and actions—which included taking steps to make airlines more accountable for breaking disabled people’s wheelchairs.

It is also impossible to separate Trump’s attacks on intellect—he centered his speech on a fixation with air traffic controllers as “naturally talented geniuses”—from his previously expressed racist views, or from his fixation on hiring processes in the FAA that tried to recruit more workers of color.

This is allegedly the person, after all, who told his ex-fixer Michael Cohen that “Black people are too stupid to vote for me.” He cast blame on the FAA’s “diversity and inclusion hiring plan, which says diversity is integral to achieving FAA’s mission of ensuring safe and efficient travel—I don’t think so. I don’t think so. I think it’s just the opposite.”

And even though Barack Obama has been out of office for more than eight years, Trump—who boosted his political prominence by pushing racist birther conspiracy theories against the former president—found time to attack him for FAA hiring changes. “I changed the Obama standards from very mediocre at best,” he said. “I put safety first. Obama, Biden, and the Democrats put policy first.”

“African-Americans, Hispanic Americans, we took care of everybody at levels that nobody’s ever seen before,” Trump said in another bizarre segue. But the FAA “determined that the workforce was too white,” he claimed. “Too white—and, uh, we want the people that are competent. But now we mourn.”

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And the essential ingredient that makes all this possible? Readers like you.

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