By Stacy M. Brown
NNPA Newswire Senior National Correspondent
@StacyBrownMedia
American hate continued in one of its worst forms as political partisanship and racism consumed briefings that featured President Donald Trump, Vice President J.D. Vance, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. The briefings followed the devastating midair collision over Reagan National Airport that killed all 64 people aboard an American Airlines flight and at least three military personnel in a Black Hawk helicopter. Rather than focus on the victims or provide substantive details about the ongoing investigation, Trump and his officials used the tragedy to attack Democrats and falsely blame former Presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama. Obama, who left office in 2017, was somehow dragged into the conversation, while Trump and his allies baselessly claimed the crash resulted from diversity, equity, and inclusion policies—initiatives that have been in place in the federal government since at least the 1960s after President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act.
Even as mainstream media figures like Bakari Sellers urged against assigning blame so soon after the crash, Trump once again showed no bottom. Instead of acknowledging the gravity of the moment, he seized on the disaster to push his political agenda. “We must have only the highest standards for those who work in our aviation system. I changed the Obama standards from very mediocre at best to extraordinary,” Trump claimed, without citing any policy changes or evidence. “And then 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,” he continued. “Their policy was horrible, and their politics was even worse.”
Trump then aimed at what he called an “FAA diversity push,” spewing falsehoods about hiring standards. “They’re including people with severe intellectual and psychiatric disabilities—it’s amazing,” he said. From there, he turned his attacks on former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. “Do you know how badly everything’s run since he’s run the Department of Transportation?” Trump said. “He’s a disaster. He was a disaster as a mayor. He ran his city into the ground, and he’s a disaster. Now he’s just got a good line of bulls—.”
Vance, Duffy, and Hegseth echoed Trump’s attacks, claiming that only the “best and brightest” should be hired in air traffic control and government agencies. “If you go back to just some of the headlines over the past 10 years, you have many hundreds of people suing the government because they would like to be air traffic controllers, but they were turned away because of the color of their skin,” Vance falsely asserted, offering no proof. Hegseth piled on, declaring that “the era of DEI is gone at the Defense Department.” “The best leaders possible—whether it’s flying Black Hawks, flying airplanes, leading platoons, or in government—will be chosen based on merit,” Hegseth said.
Duffy blamed the crash on government hiring practices without offering any evidence. “We are going to take responsibility at the Department of Transportation and the FAA to make sure we have the reforms that have been dictated by President Trump in place to make sure that these mistakes do not happen again and again,” he said. Meanwhile, as Trump and his allies turned a national tragedy into a political spectacle, Democrats urged patience while investigators worked to determine the cause of the crash. “It never does any good to speculate on the causes of aviation accidents before we have the facts and the details,” Rep. Rick Larsen (D-WA) said. “It is important to let the NTSB complete its work before we consider any potential policy response.” “My heart goes out to the families of the victims on both aircraft following last night’s awful tragedy,” he added.
Among those killed were 14 skaters returning home from a national development camp in Wichita, Kansas, including six members of the Skating Club of Boston—two teenage athletes, their mothers, and two coaches. Doug Zeghibe, CEO of The Skating Club of Boston, fought back tears as he spoke to NBC Boston. “Skating is a very close and tight-knit community. I think for all of us, we have lost family,” he said. He called the two coaches, Vadim Naumov and Evgenia Shishkova, “top coaches,” noting that they were the 1994 world pair champions. “This wasn’t the first plane tragedy for the club,” Zeghibe said, recalling the 1961 crash that killed the entire U.S. figure skating world team en route to the world championships in Prague. “It had long-reaching implications for this skating club and the sport in this country because when you lose coaches like this, you lose the future of the sport as well.”
