At a White House briefing meant to address Wednesday night’s fatal mid-air collision over the Potomac River, President Trump instead took the opportunity to launch into the lowering air traffic control standards through diversity hiring.
TTrump admitted up front that he wasn’t entirely sure if these hiring policies had anything to do with the disaster that killed 64 people aboard an American Airlines flight and three Army Black Hawk crew members—but that didn’t stop him from making it the headline.
“I changed the Obama standards from very mediocre at best to extraordinary,” Trump declared, painting himself as the great reformer of the FAA. “You remember that, only the highest aptitude, the highest intellect, and psychologically superior people were allowed to qualify for air traffic controllers.”
Then came the pivot: the Biden administration, of course, ruined everything.
“And then when I left office and Biden took over, he changed them back to lower than ever before,” Trump lamented. “I put safety first. Obama, Biden, and the Democrats put policy first, and they put politics at a level that nobody’s ever seen because this was the lowest level.”
With his usual mix of outrage and dramatic flair, Trump singled out Pete Buttigieg, calling the former transportation secretary a “disaster” with “a good line of bulls—” who had “run the FAA right into the ground with his diversity.”
Then, in what can only be described as a moment tailor-made for headlines, Trump read aloud from an FAA report with scornful disbelief:
“The FAA website states they include hearing, vision, missing extremities, partial paralysis, complete paralysis, epilepsy, severe intellectual disability, psychiatric disability, and dwarfism—all qualified for the position of a controller.”Pausing for dramatic effect, Trump let the moment sink in before adding that he still wasn’t sure if any of this had actually played a role in the deadly crash.
Later that afternoon, he returned to the topic in the Oval Office, telling reporters that diversity policies “may or may not have had to do” with the accident but, just to be safe, he had signed an order demanding an immediate review of aviation safety standards—with a special emphasis on “competence” in hiring.
So, the key takeaway from the briefing? A tragic aviation disaster, an unverified connection to diversity hiring, and a new Trump policy that just happened to align perfectly with his long-running grievances. Just another day in the news cycle.
