President Donald Trump doubled down on his opposition to diversity, equity, and inclusion policies (DEI) during a White House briefing on Thursday, suggesting that those initiatives could have played a part in the deadly Washington DC helicopter and plane crash on Wednesday.
Several news outlets reported that a U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter collided midair with an American Airlines passenger plane with 64 people on board. The plane was preparing to land at the Reagan Washington National Airport while the helicopter was on an “annual proficiency training flight.” Sixty-seven people were reported dead.
ABC News reported that though Trump blamed the DEI policies on the recruitment processes of air traffic controllers, he stopped short of providing any evidence. “I put safety first, Obama, Biden and the Democrats put policy first, and they put politics at a level that nobody’s ever seen,” Trump told reporters.
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“I had to say that it’s terrible,” he also said before making mention of a supposed story about some Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) officials who had “determined that the [FAA] workforce was too white, that they had concerted efforts to get the administration to change that and to change it immediately. This was in the Obama administration, just prior to my getting there, and we took care of African Americans, Hispanic Americans.”
Trump, however, said they did not know how the crash occurred when a reporter from the news outlet asked if he was implying the crash stemmed from diversity hiring. He was also asked how he managed to establish one of the reasons behind the collision was because of the FAA’s diversity policies.
“Because I have common sense, OK, and unfortunately a lot of people don’t,” Trump replied.
Trump on Thursday later appointed Christopher Rocheleau as FAA’s acting commissioner. On the same day, he additionally signed an executive order “aimed at undoing all of” the “damage” that came about as a result of the “Biden administration’s DEI and woke policies.”
“We want the most competent people. We don’t care what race they are,” Trump said. “If they don’t have a great brain, a great power of the brain, they’re not going to be very good at what they do and bad things will happen.”
But a former FAA official told ABC News that the hiring procedure for air traffic control does not involve DEI and programs of such nature. The former official also said that applicants do not receive preferential treatment becsue of their race, sex, ethnicity or sexual orientation.
Pete Buttigieg, who served as transportation secretary under the Biden government, labeled Trump’s comments as “despicable” in a post on X.
“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,” he added.
“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. Time for the President to show actual leadership and explain what he will do to prevent this from happening again.”
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