The Tragic and the Vile

“Not surprised. Disgusted.” — Capt. Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger¹, on Donald Trump’s attempt to blame the DCA tragedy on DEI.

Exactly right. So fair warning: Today’s newsletter will be snark-free, but loaded with disgust for our vile un-president and his gang of loathsome lickspittles.

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What happened yesterday felt familiar. Trump’s same-old-same-old bigotry, bullshit, and blame-casting. We’ve seen this sort of feculent demagoguery so often before — after the New Orleans terror attack, after the SoCal fires —that it’s hard to be shocked.

But we can still be nauseated.

Make sure you read Jonathan Lemire’s piece in The Atlantic: The Day Trump Became Un-President. In some ways, Lemire reminds us, yesterday was a flashback to the Trump of 2020.

[Just] like in 2020, Trump used a national calamity to try to score political points and denigrate his foes. Fourteen hours after a midair collision between an American Airlines jet and a military helicopter outside Washington last night—the first crisis of the young administration, a moment to console a stunned and grieving nation—Trump repeatedly implied that the crash was the fault of his Democratic predecessors and of DEI policies.

Trump offered no evidence to support his claims but repeatedly cast the blame on others, even as bodies were still being pulled from the frigid waters of the Potomac River just a few miles away.

But the press conference was not a random moment of vileness. Later in the day, Trump signed an “Executive Order” (actually just a trumped up press release) blaming his predecessors for the tragedy. He did this, as Senator Tammy Duckworth wrote:

While the victims are still in the water.

The Blackhawk crew is still strapped into the cockpit.

Families are mourning.

And Trump is blaming DEI, suggesting our pilots and air traffic controllers don't deserve their jobs.

We need compassion and leadership— Our President showed none.

**

Democrats, who have been floundering the last couple of weeks, seem to have found their voice. And Pete Buttigieg wasn’t going to let Trump get away with shifting the blame.

Here are a few things you need to know (and perhaps share with your MAGA friends, relatives, and coworkers).

• The United States had not had a fatal airliner crash in 16 years.

• This happened last week:

• The Shadow President forced out the FAA director. Via the Daily Beast:

  The Federal Aviation Administration’s leader stepped down on Jan. 20, months after Elon Musk demanded that he quit….

  Whitaker’s departure came after he clashed with Musk, who is now in charge not just of SpaceX but has been named by Trump as the head of the new Department of Government Efficiency, which is not technically a real government department.

  In September Whitaker had proposed fines of more than $600,000 for SpaceX, prompting Musk to demand his resignation and promise to sue.

• This happened this week:

  On Tuesday night, just 24 hours before a deadly collision between a military helicopter and a regional jet at Reagan National Airport, a different passenger jet coming in for a landing at the airport alerted the tower it had to abort. The reason: risk of possible collision with a helicopter.

• This also happened:

• Those DEI rules? “Trump launched air controller diversity program that he now decries.”

  In the news conference, Trump said Obama weakened standards and “I changed the Obama standards from very mediocre at best, to extraordinary. … Then they changed it back — that was Biden.”

  Trump’s claim was repeated in an executive order Trump signed Thursday that ordered a review of aviation safety: “During my first term, my Administration raised standards to achieve the highest standards of safety and excellence.”

  That’s false. In his first term, Trump left the standards unchanged.

  For air traffic controllers, the Obama administration in 2013 instituted a new hiring system that introduced a biographical questionnaire to attract minorities, underrepresented in the controller corps. The program was criticized, such as in a Fox News report in 2015, as making it harder for more skilled applicants to get hired as controllers.

  But Trump, in his first term, left the policy in place, leading to a class-action lawsuit filed in 2019 by Mountain States Legal Foundation. The case was due to go to trial this year.

• The scope of the tragedy is unimaginable: “All 64 passengers on board the fatal American Airlines flight have been named and pictured, including children and their mothers.” Three crewmen on the helicopter also lost their lives.

Trump’s DEI

To the man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And, as we learned over the last 48 hours, for MAGA, everything can be blamed on DEI. By which the Trumpists mean that any disaster or tragedy can be attributed to the hiring of black people, Hispanics, women, or the disabled— who, by their definition, were unqualified for the jobs.

For the moment, let’s set aside the various unsubtle -isms that have now become routine in Trump’s world, and talk about MAGA’s emphasis on “qualifications.”

I promised no snark, but AYFKM? If irony were not long dead, it would hang itself listening to this gang of incompetent crawlers, nepo-babies, and Fox News couch-sitters talk about “qualifications” with a straight face.

Trump, Jonathan Chait notes, is promising a return to meritocracy—while staffing his government with unqualified loyalists. Let’s start with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who rushed to echo his master’s bullshit. “The era of DEI is gone at the Defense Department,” he declared, “and we need the best and brightest, whether it’s in our air-traffic control or whether it’s in our generals or whether it’s throughout government.”

Observes Chait:

This was rich coming from a man who might be the least qualified secretary of defense in American history—a Cabinet official whose professional qualifications include mismanaging two small lobbying organizations and whose alleged history of drinking and mistreatment of women led his own sister-in-law to urge the Senate to reject his nomination, as it very nearly did.

And Hegseth is hardly an outlier. Trump has already done more to abandon the ideal of meritocracy than perhaps any presidential administration since the Progressive Era. He is going to war against the civil-service system, which was established more than a century ago to ensure that federal jobs go to qualified civil servants, rather than as rewards for party hacks, as had been the case previously. Trump, who believes that nonpartisan civil servants constitute a “deep state” conspiracy against him, would rather lose their expertise than risk it being deployed in ways that thwart his personal ambitions.

**

Exit take: There is, I am afraid, no metric that can measure the lack of self-awareness here:

Finally

Spoiler alert: There is no one.

Friday Pete

Hug your loved ones.

Pete, 2023

1. Sully is, of course, the pilot who safely landed a passenger plane in the Hudson River in 2009, in what became known as the “Miracle on the Hudson.” He made the comment on Lawrence O’Donnell’s show after what seemed an heroic effort not to say, “Fuck that guy.”