President Donald Trump held a press conference on Thursday to address the late-night crash between a commercial airplane and an Army Black Hawk helicopter.
Unsurprisingly, Trump used the tragedy to play a blame game that included everything from President Barack Obama and Pete Buttigieg, to the helicopter pilot and “dwarfism.”
After telling reporters that there will be an investigation, Trump launched into a—frequently contradictory—litany of reasons that he and his new, unqualified Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy would not take any responsibility.
Rescue teams searched the Potomac River early Thursday morning.
“The FAA is actively recruiting workers who suffer severe intellectual disabilities, psychiatric problems,” Trump claimed, before generating an incorrect retelling of the Federal Aviation Administration’s hiring policies.
“Obama-Biden and the Democrats put policy first, and they put politics at a level that nobody's ever seen because this was the lowest level,” he blathered.
Trump also mentioned a mythical “Obama policy” that he claims to have changed at least four times.
“Biden came in, and he changed it,” Trump added as a reason why the FAA is no longer up to his standards.
Trump went on to blame the crash on the 2020 election results, which he refuses to accept to this day.
“I was going to rebuild the entire system, and then we had an election that didn't turn out the way it should have,” Trump said at one point, claiming that he would have gotten a “new system” from a private company had the election not gone the “wrong way.”
But he didn’t stop there.
Emergency personnel search the wreckage in the Potomac River.
“The FAA's website states they include hearing vision, missing extremities, partial paralysis, complete paralysis, epilepsy, severe intellectual disability, psychiatric disability, and dwarfism,” he said.
But the FAA's inclusion of disabled people has actually been an active policy since 2013. Trump didn’t just work under that policy during his first term, but he even launched his own FAA disability outreach initiative in 2019.
This fact was brought up in the Q&A portion of the press conference, during which Trump simply rewrote history.
“I did change it. I changed the Obama policy, and we had a very good policy,” he said.
“We do not even yet know the names of the 67 people who were killed, and you are blaming Democrats and DEI policies, and air traffic control, and seemingly the member of the U.S. military who was flying that Black Hawk helicopter,” CNN’s Kaitlan Collins said. “Don't you think you're getting ahead of the investigation right now?”
“I don't think so at all. I don't think with the names of the people. You mean the names of the people that are on the plane? You think that's going to make a difference?” Trump responded.
“Despicable. “As families grieve, Trump should be leading, not lying. 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,” Buttigieg, former secretary of transportation, wrote on social media.
“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,” he added. “Time for the President to show actual leadership and explain what he will do to prevent this from happening again.”
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