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 Hafiz Rashid 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

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— 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?

Voters, including Trump voters, are going to be very surprised at the “mandate” they allegedly gave Trump. This is the first headline I saw today, from the New York Times, for example:

Yep, the New York Times reports that RFK the Lesser’s lawyer, a man actively involved in hiring for the new Regime, has been trying to get the polio vaccine banned. And other vaccines as well, including hepatitis B, tetanus, Covid-19, and diphtheria.

The lawyer helping Robert F. Kennedy Jr. pick federal health officials for the incoming Trump administration has petitioned the government to revoke its approval of the polio vaccine, which for decades has protected millions of people from a virus that can cause paralysis or death.

That campaign is just one front in the war that the lawyer, Aaron Siri, is waging against vaccines of all kinds.

Mr. Siri has also filed a petition seeking to pause the distribution of 13 other vaccines; challenged, and in some cases quashed, Covid vaccine mandates around the country; sued federal agencies for the disclosure of records related to vaccine approvals; and subjected prominent vaccine scientists to grueling videotaped depositions.

Of course, RFK the Lesser hasn’t yet been confirmed as the head of Health and Human Services, so there’s a faint home the new Regime won’t run something like the Spanish Inquisition aimed at scientists. But I don’t think most voters had any idea banning vaccines was a possibility. It is. This is from an interview with Trump in Time magazine:

One of them who is controversial, who I just want to ask you a quick question about, is RFK Jr, who is a noted vaccine skeptic. If he moves to end childhood vaccination programs, would you sign off on that?

We’re going to have a big discussion. The autism rate is at a level that nobody ever believed possible. If you look at things that are happening, there’s something causing it.

Do you think it’s linked to vaccines? 

No, I’m going to be listening to Bobby, who I’ve really gotten along with great and I have a lot of respect for having to do with food, having to do with vaccinations. He does not disagree with vaccinations, all vaccinations. He disagrees probably with some. But we’ll have it. We’re going to do what’s good for the country. 

So that could include getting rid of some vaccinations? 

It could if I think it’s dangerous, if I think they are not beneficial, but I don’t think it’s going to be very controversial in the end. 

Do you agree with him about the connection between vaccines and autism? 

I want to see the numbers. It’s going to be the numbers. We will be able to do—I think you’re going to feel very good about it at the end. We’re going to be able to do very serious testing, and we’ll see the numbers. A lot of people think a lot of different things. And at the end of the studies that we’re doing, and we’re going all out, we’re going to know what’s good and what’s not good. We will know for sure what’s good and what’s not good. 

The alleged connection between vaccines and autism was first proposed more than 25 years ago and has been debunked up the wazoo. The original claim was based on bogus data. This has been verified beyond question. Yet we’re going to waste taxpayer dollars “studying” it some more.

Yes, a lot of people think a lot of different things, and a lot of those people are stupid.

Here’s another headline for you:

Yep, they want to drastically deregulate the financial sector. Has all memory of the 2008 financial crisis melted away, somehow? Note that the Heritage Foundation is on record as wanting to abolish the FDIC and replace it with private insurance going back about forty years. And I’m sure the Trump Family Grifters are already cooking up a way for them to use deregulation to make a fast killing off the rubes.

This is quote from the Wall Street Journal that I got from Talking Points Memo:

The Trump transition team has started to explore pathways to dramatically shrink, consolidate or even eliminate the top bank watchdogs in Washington. 

In recent interviews with potential nominees to lead bank regulatory agencies, President-elect Donald Trump’s advisers and officials from his newfound Department of Government Efficiency have, for example, asked whether he could abolish the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., people familiar with the matter said.

There are no words. This is stupid beyond all known parameters of stupid.

On to other stuff — Ronald Brownstein writes in the Atlantic —

Donald Trump’s support in rural America appears to have virtually no ceiling. In last month’s election, Trump won country communities by even larger margins than he did in his 2020 and 2016 presidential runs. But several core second-term policies that Trump and the Republican Congress have championed could disproportionately harm those places.

Agricultural producers could face worse losses than any other economic sector from Trump’s plans to impose sweeping tariffs on imports and to undertake what he frequently has called “the largest domestic deportation operation” of undocumented immigrants “in American history.” Hospitals and other health providers in rural areas could face the greatest strain from proposals Trump has embraced to slash spending on Medicaid, which provides coverage to a greater share of adults in smaller communities than in large metropolitan areas. And small-town public schools would likely be destabilized even more than urban school districts if Trump succeeds in his pledge to expand “school choice” by providing parents with vouchers to send their kids to private schools.

I’ve written about some of this before. For example, to me, “school choice” is an urban/elitist argument that ignores the realities of small town and rural communities. See, for example, The Republican War Against Public Schools Is a War Against the “Heartland” from 2020.

And I’ve written before about how rural hospitals are closing, especially in states that go cheap on Medicaid. See, from 2018, The Fruits of GOP Health Care in Missouri. Hospitals in low-population areas really need Medicaid dollars to stay open. And as of July 2024, Medicaid is the primary payer for 63 percent of U.S. nursing home residents. If they kill Medicaid, where will those people go?

The “government efficiency” guys don’t seem to understand that if you cut government cost, those costs don’t go away. And they aren’t painlessly absorbed by the private sector. In the end the economic and other devastation that will be visited on Americans will end up costing more in the long run.