The plane that crashed into the Potomac carried figure skaters and their families, according to U.S. Figure Skating. So sad. And then Trump gets his ugly orange face in front of a microphone and blames DEI, Barack Obama, Pete Buttigieg, Joe Biden, and possibly the cast of Hamilton for the disaster. Well, okay, he didn’t blame Hamilton. But I bet he would have if someone had brought it up.
There has been no investigation yet into what caused an army helicopter and a commercial jet to collide. But Trump is already making sure everyone knows it wasn’t his fault. It was those other people he doesn’t like. And then the useless twerp of a Veep added, “When you don’t have the best standards in who you’re hiring, it means on the one hand, you’re not getting the best people in government. But on the other hand, it puts stresses on the people who are already there.”
That’s rich, coming from an administration being run by flying monkeys. Today’s exercise in blame happened while the confirmation hearings for Tulsi Gabbard and Kash Patel, two people outrageously unqualified for the sensitive positions to which they’ve been nominated.
Now the Federal Aviation Administration is operating without a head, because the last FAA administrator, Mike Whitaker, quit on January 20 after Elon Musk told him to resign, according to the Daily Beast. Musk accused Whitaker of standing in the way of his vision of putting human life on Mars, says the Daily Beast.
It’s true that the FAA has struggled with a shortage of air traffic controllers for some time. Note that air traffic controllers were included in the recent buyout offer to federal employees. More on that in a bit.
See also Trump Gutted Key Aviation Safety Committee Before D.C. Plane Crash by at The New Republic.
Last week, just days after his inauguration, Donald Trump eliminated the membership of a key committee that handles aviation security. And on Wednesday night, a passenger plane collided with a military helicopter in the Washington, D.C., area.
On Tuesday, January 22, the Aviation Security Advisory Committee’s members received a memo from the Trump administration saying that the Department of Homeland Security was getting rid of the membership of all advisory committees in a “commitment to eliminating the misuse of resources and ensuring that DHS activities prioritize our national security.” At the same time, Trump also fired the heads of the Transportation Security Administration and the Coast Guard.
Congress mandated the aviation committee in 1988, after the PanAm Flight 103 bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland. After Trump’s move, the committee technically continues to exist but has no members to examine safety issues in airlines and airports. Its membership consisted of key groups in the aviation industry, from major unions to representatives from major airlines, as well as a group associated with victims of the PanAm bombing.
Throughout its existence, the committee’s recommendations were adopted into air travel procedure. It was out of commission for more than a week until Wednesday’s disaster. No survivors were reported in the crash between American Eagle Flight 5342 heading to D.C. from Wichita, Kansas, and a U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter.
I don’t know that these dismissals have had any impact on airline safety, yet. But of course I don’t know that they didn’t, either.
And what about the U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter? Maybe it was somewhere it wasn’t supposed to be, and maybe that was Pete Hegseth’s fault. We don’t know.
Pete Buttigieg isn’t taking any of this lying down.
Well said, Pete Buttigieg
— Andrew Weinstein (@andrewjweinstein.com) January 30, 2025 at 12:43 PM
Trump won’t do anything but flap his little hands around and claim to be making air travel great again. Did I mention the cost of a dozen basic store brand large eggs at the local grocery was $6.99 this week? See also Trump Administration’s Halt of CDC’s Weekly Scientific Report Stalls Bird Flu Studies. We are entering an egg crisis that ordinary people are noticing. Trump doesn’t see how his dumb decisions are blowing back on him.
Trump is no leader of any kind, and what seems to be happening is that a few people are setting up their own fiefdoms within the administration and operating pretty much independently of Trump. Both the spending freeze and the fake employee buyout appear to have been put into motion without White House approval. Josh Marshall has a great bit up, White House Says We Were Out of the Loop—ON EVERYTHING.
The news, linked above, that the resignation emails were Team Elon’s idea and didn’t have the okay of the White House comes from a Washington Post article. But we get pretty much the same story in an Ashley Parker article published overnight in The Atlantic, only this time about the across-the-board federal spending freeze and the “memo” that kicked it off Monday. That one was Vought’s team — if not Vought himself, who has yet to be confirmed — at OMB. White House officials told Parker that the memo “was released without going through the usual White House approval processes.”
So the White House is saying they were out of the loop, caught as off guard as everyone else, by the two big conflagrations that have roiled the federal government over the course of this week and led to what is now universally conceded to be a fairly epic face plant little more than a week into the administration. It’s not exonerating. It’s by design. But I suspect that in this narrow sense it’s true. Because that’s how these folks operate. Trump remains entirely a transactional creature. Ideology, in any articulate sense, is entirely alien to him. He wants to be loved, which in his mind means total power and total subservience. Amidst the raging bureaucratic storm and planes tumbling out of the sky after two decades-plus of near-perfect safety in U.S. airspace, we learned yesterday afternoon that Trump told Mark Zuckerberg last November that the price of being “brought into the [Trump] tent” was arranging a $25 million bribe in the form of settling a meritless lawsuit from 2020 which had no hope of success. …
… So the “resignations” gambit from the Office of Personal Management is from Team Musk, which appears to be running OPM, trying to “disrupt” the federal workforce with “move fast and break things” Silicon Valley values. The OMB memo is the work of Christian nationalist Russell Vought, who envisions an electoral presidential dictatorship which uses its power to enforce a top down re-traditionalizing of American society and culture.
Are we having fun yet?
So what happens when all those "independent fiefdoms" start fighting for control? You know that's next.
There was actually some pushback from the press to Trump's assertion that DEI was somehow a cause of the crash. His brilliant explanation: "Because I have common sense." PeeWee Herman could have been more clever. About the time I was prepared to disregard on the basis of sheer stupidity, I realized that Michael Cohen had explained that Trump speaks in code.
The scheme may be far more sophisticated than I gave Team Trump credit for. I was born in 1953 when segregation was institutional in many parts of the country. Here's how I interpret the code of today's statements by Mr. Trump. He was talking about the FAA specifically and the federal government more generally when he railed against DEI.
The code that MAGA got loud and clear: "No black man in the FAA should have a job, no matter how qualified he is if that's a job a white man would want, no matter how unqualified he is."
Factor in two other components dear to MAGA/GOP. First, eliminate the social safety net so that blacks will work for the wages offered at the "plantation – or starve." Second, deport the Hispanic work force at the bottom of the social ladder so black Americans can return to the work force intended by the founding fathers. (Before the Civil War) Trump does not want to starve Black Americans – he wants them to work for starvation wages for their white masters.
If I'm not hallucinating, this is Trump's diabolical vision which he has conveyed perfectly to his followers without saying it out loud. And some of them will die trying to implement it because it's the "natural order."
Before anyone says it, this is a gross oversimplification. I left out the Trumpian vision for women's place, and other minorities like Native Americans. And positions of power for "Uncle Toms"… who does that bring to mind named Thomas?
IMO, Democrats have to realize what the objectives are – it's not enough to say they want to rule, not govern. There may be enough evidence from the Administration's actions for us to resist strategically. I've been guilty of dismissing them as idiots (and most of MAGA fits that description) but some folks may be calling plays that fit into a game plan.