The Buck Stops With Women And Minorities

January 31, 2025

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After what was arguably the first major tragedy of his second term in office, President Trump held an extraordinary press conference. Speaking from behind the podium in the White House briefing room, Trump painted a terrifying picture.

“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,” he began.

In Trump’s telling, on Wednesday evening, an American Airlines flight and a U.S. Army helicopter were downed as the result of diversity. This was, per Trump, in no small part the result of President Joe Biden, who left office ten days ago, and President Barack Obama, who left office in 2017.

Of course, that’s not exactly what Trump said, but it’s also not that substantively different. And it is about as grounded in reality as the president’s assessment of the tragic accident. His comments came as the recovery mission to pull bodies and wreckage from the icy Potomac is ongoing. Shortly after Trump gave his highly politicized take on the collision, National Transportation Safety Board Chair Jennifer Homendy held her own news conference wherein she confirmed they are still investigating what caused the crash.

“We do have information, we have data. We have substantial amounts of information — we need to verify information. We need to take our time to make sure it is accurate,” Homendy said.

The collision on Wednesday night took place when an American Airlines flight from Wichita, Kansas to Reagan Washington National Airport collided with an Army helicopter. All 64 people on board the flight and the three servicemembers who were in the helicopter are believed to have been killed.

Trump began his remarks with a moment of silence for the victims. He then launched into a series of attacks blaming efforts to promote workplace diversity for the disaster. He suggested that Obama and, later, Biden had hurt the quality of air traffic controllers by emphasizing the hiring of women, minorities, and people with disabilities at the Federal Aviation Administration.

“They put a big push to put diversity into the FAA’s program,” Trump said of the two Democratic presidents.

“When I left office and Biden took over, he changed them back to lower than ever before. I put safety first. Obama, Biden and the Democrats put policy first and they put politics at a level that nobody’s ever seen,” Trump claimed.

Trump suggested he had made things right again during the first days of his return to office with a Jan. 22 executive order that was titled “Donald J. Trump Ends DEI Madness and Restores Excellence and Safety within the Federal Aviation Administration.”

“About a week ago, almost upon entering office, I signed something — last week — that was an executive order, a very powerful one restoring the highest standards of air traffic controllers — and others, by the way,” Trump said. “My administration will 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, it matters — intellect, talent, the word ‘talent.’ … You can’t have regular people doing that job.”

In other words, Trump wasn’t just passing the buck to and casting blame on his predecessors. He was also raising the spectre of “DEI,” which along with “woke” became a ubiquitous target as Trump fought to win back the White House last year. And, while blaming “DEI” for something like a plane crash might help win over reactionary voters, it comes with a lot of baggage. That message, which has been a cornerstone of Trump’s return to power, also effectively means blaming women and minorities for problems and implying that they are not, as Trump said, “the highest intellect and highly superior people.”

Trump offered no evidence whatsoever for this latest baseless assault on women and minorities. In his remarks, the president admitted that “we don’t know that necessarily it’s even the controller’s fault.” He presented no statistics or concrete information about the impact of DEI programs at the FAA.

In fact, when it came time to question the president, NBC News chief White House correspondent Peter Alexander pointed out language from the agency that Trump read to suggest its hiring policies were overly focused on diversity and had actually been on the FAA website during the first Trump administration. Trump later said Alexander’s question was “totally irrelevant and not very good.”

Trump was joined by several of the leading figures in his administration for the event, including Vice President J.D. Vance and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, a longtime crusader against diversity. Both of them echoed his message. Trump also trotted out Transportation Secretary and veteran of MTV’s “Real World/Road Rules Challenge” Sean Duffy who stressed that the administration will “only accept the best and the brightest in positions of safety.”

“Mr. President, that is the motto of your presidency: the best and the brightest, the most intelligent,” Duffy said.

The focus on excellence and, as Trump said, “naturally talented geniuses” was particularly evident when the president offered a breakdown of the crash where he seemed to muse about the very nature of space and time.

“They shouldn’t have been at the same height. You’re going with — in reverse directions or sideways directions — obviously you want to be at different heights,” Trump said. “I see it all the time when I’m flying. You have planes going in the opposite — they’re always lower, we’re higher.”

“There’s never going to be a tragedy if you’re in a different elevation,” he continued. “For whatever reason, they were at the same elevation. … They should have been at a different height.”

While the NTSB officials are still laboring over the evidence, Trump had figured out not just one explanation but two. It wasn’t just minorities and women. The whole collision probably wouldn’t have happened if the two aircraft were not in the same place.

Nothing but the best and brightest.