Trump and Allies Default to Racist Explanation of Deadly Air Collision

Even as crews continued to retrieve bodies from the Potomac River following a mid-air collision Wednesday night between a commercial jet and a U.S. Army helicopter over Washington, D.C., President Donald Trump sought to lay the blame for the tragedy on workplace diversity initiatives. His now familiar refrain against diversity, equity, and inclusion policies — convenient for packaging racist, sexist, homophobic, and transphobic rhetoric into easily digested soundbites — had no evident connection to the accident, which officials have just begun to investigate. But that didn’t stop Trump from signing a memorandum Thursday demanding an “immediate assessment of aviation safety,” an order that mostly served to blast what the White House called “problematic and likely illegal decisions during the Obama and Biden Administrations that minimized merit and competence in the Federal Aviation Administration,” including the implementation of “dangerous” DEI practices.

In a press conference on Thursday morning where Vice President J.D. Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy all suggested that the Federal Aviation Administration had hired unqualified and incompetent air traffic controllers due to diversity hiring practices, Trump claimed that Democrats had imperiled lives by lowering the requirements for such jobs. “They put a big push to put diversity into the FAA’s program,” he said. Asked by a reporter if he was seriously asserting that the crash had happened because of DEI, he replied, “It just could have been. We have a high standard, a much higher standard than anybody else, and there are things where you have to go by brainpower, you have to go by psychological quality, and psychological quality is a very important element of it.”

It’s not known what caused the crash between the Black Hawk Army helicopter and American Airlines Flight 5342, which was making its final approach to Ronald Reagan National Airport. The 64 people aboard the regional jet flying in from Wichita, Kansas, and the three soldiers aboard the helicopter are all presumed dead.
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But the lack of explanation for such an incident rarely dampens the spirit of an ongoing and cynical culture war: Trump and many others in his orbit have campaigned ferociously against DEI and repeatedly used it to scapegoat anyone who isn’t a straight, white, cisgender male every time disaster strikes. When Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge collapsed last year, far-right social media accounts labeled the city’s Black mayor, Brandon Scott, a “DEI mayor” in racist attacks. As deadly wildfires consumed entire neighborhoods in Los Angeles this month, Republicans baselessly argued that the city had excluded white men from becoming firefighters and elevated a gay woman to the role of fire chief solely because of her identity — instead of acknowledging that the scale of the destruction was attributable to climate change.

Since taking office, Trump has slashed away at diversity measures and personnel in government with a series of executive orders. One order, issued Jan. 22, called for the elimination of DEI policies at the FAA, alleging that under President Biden and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, the agency “prioritized diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) over safety and efficiency.” But, as a reporter pointed out at Thursday’s press conference, the FAA’s commitment to diverse hiring predated Biden’s term by at least seven years, and Trump did not amend that policy during his first term. On Thursday, Trump also appointed Christopher Rocheleau as FAA administrator, filling a vacancy left when the previous administrator, Michael Whitaker, resigned under pressure from Trump megadonor Elon Musk, who had long feuded with him over how the agency regulated his company SpaceX. Musk is a seething critic of DEI as well, often posting on X that it means people “DIE,” and while he did not draw a direct connection between diversity and Wednesday’s aircraft collision, he did amplify a post on Thursday that claimed “Diversity is sometimes a weakness.”
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Speaking to reporters, Trump brushed aside the question of why he immediately defaulted to his usual dogwhistles about the supposed dangers of diverse workplaces when acknowledging the loss of life in an accident that had yet to be probed in detail. With so much uncertain, one journalist asked him how he had “come to the conclusion right now that diversity had something to do with this crash.” Trump replied, “Because I have common sense, okay? And unfortunately a lot of people don’t. We want brilliant people doing this.”

MAGA loyalists predictably cheered these comments online, though in practical terms, Trump may find that it is easier to pin blame on minority groups as an aggrieved candidate than it is as commander-in-chief. His second day in the White House, members of the Department of Homeland Security’s Aviation Security Advisory Committee received a memo that said they were being removed from their posts as the administration carried out a mission of “eliminating the misuse of resources and ensuring that DHS activities prioritize our national security.”

Among those to condemn this decisions on Thursday were Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), who posted on X, “Trump gutted the Aviation Safety committee last week,” adding that the president’s purge of veteran federal workers was going to take a toll on air traffic control staffs that are already stretched thin. “It’s not DEI — it’s him,” she wrote. Buttigieg also took Trump to task and defended his record as transportation secretary. “As families grieve, Trump should be leading, not lying,” he wrote on X. “We put safety first, drove down close calls, grew Air Traffic Control, and had zero commercial airline crash fatalities out of millions of flights on our watch. President Trump now oversees the military and the FAA. One of his first acts was to fire and suspend some of the key personnel who helped keep our skies safe.”

On Wednesday evening, before turning to his anti-DEI playbook, Trump appeared to find fault with the pilot of the Army helicopter involved in the accident. “It is a CLEAR NIGHT, the lights on the plane were blazing, why didn’t the helicopter go up or down, or turn,” he asked in a post on Truth Social. By Thursday afternoon, however, he was all in on the nonsensical diversity narrative, signing the presidential memorandum ordering Secretary Duffy and the acting FAA administrator to assess “the damage done to aviation safety by the Biden administration’s DEI and woke policies,” as an aide described it when handing him the document for his signature.

As Trumpian theater, it’s par for the course. Whether it eases anyone’s mind about boarding a plane is an entirely different matter.