Anatomy of a plane crash

Trump blamed "diversity" for the crash that killed 67 people, a week after he gutted a key aviation safety commission and put an MTV Road Rules guy in charge of transportation.

The day after a U.S. army helicopter crashed into an American Airlines passenger plane over the Potomac River in D.C., killing 67 people—including U.S. and Russian figure skaters coming back from a national development camp—Trump gave a rabidly racist press conference in which he blamed the crash on Joe Biden and his “diversity” hires at the Federal Aviation Administration. Asked what evidence he has to support that claim, considering the investigation into the crash hadn’t come to any conclusions yet, the president responded, "It just could have been.”

Later this afternoon, as actual information began dripping out, we learned that staffing at the air traffic control tower at DCA airport was “not normal” when the crash occurred—which is extremely alarming. Usually, there are two separate controllers dealing with planes and helicopters, but last night, there was only one controller trying to to handle both. And while we know that U.S. aviation has struggled with air traffic controller shortages since Reagan, we also know that Trump has greatly exacerbated air safety staffing problems since he re-settled into the Oval Office last week. The day after his inauguration, he fired the heads of the Transportation Security Administration and Coast Guard before their terms were up and eliminated a key air safety advisory group. “The aviation security committee, which was mandated by Congress after the 1988 PanAm 103 bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland, will technically continue to exist but it won’t have any members to carry out the work of examining safety issues at airlines and airports,” per an AP report last week.

The FAA administrator under Biden, Michael Whitaker, also resigned on Trump’s inauguration day under pressure from Elon Musk, because Musk was angry that Whitaker tried to fine SpaceX over $600,000 in civil penalties over two failed rocket launches in 2023. Musk had repeatedly attacked Whitaker on X, claiming in one post that the FAA was “harassing SpaceX” and asserting that the FAA “should not exist” because its annoying safety requirements are thwarting his plan to colonize Mars. Whitaker hadn’t been replaced yet as of this horrific crash.

Meanwhile, Trump replaced Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg—an objectively brilliant man and competent public servant—with Sean Duffy, whose only qualification appears to be that he won MTV’s “Road Rules: All Stars” in 2002. Now what, you may ask, was going on at the Department of Transportation the day of this plane crash? Trump’s new installations there were issuing a memo declaring that DOT-supported programs and grants should "give preference to communities with marriage and birth rates higher than the national average." So it appears that the Mormons in rural Utah will be getting some shiny new roads and bridges while the rest of us are left to wonder, as we land at our destinations, whether air traffic control happens to be staffed normally that day.

In summary, the deadliest American plane crash in two decades occurred one week into Trump’s second administration, amid his full gutting of air safety personnel. He baselessly blamed the crash on Joe Biden, women, and people of color, while also saying quite unhelpfully of the deceased helicopter pilot: "You could have gone up. You could have gone down. You could have gone straight up, straight down. You could have turned." And the Road Rules guy who’s supposed to be in charge of transportation is busy implementing Trump’s weird pro-natalist, white supremacist social agenda via the infrastructure budget.