Trump Decides Presser on D.C. Plane Crash Is Best Time for a Joke

Donald Trump just will not take Wednesday night’s deadly aviation collision seriously.

While signing yet another batch of executive orders on Thursday, the president was asked whether he planned to visit the site of the deadly midair crash between a military helicopter and an American Airlines flight, which killed all 67 people on board the two aircraft.

“I have a plan to visit, not the site, because why don’t you tell me, what’s the site? The water?” Trump said. “You want me to go swimming?”

Trump followed up his flippant response by saying he planned to meet with some of the family members of those who had died in the crash.

The bodies of at least 28 people had been recovered from the Potomac River by Thursday evening, as recovery operations continued, according to the Associated Press.

Earlier on Thursday, Trump had suggested that the Biden administration’s diversity, equity, and inclusion hiring practices were to blame for the crash, specifically pointing to the Federal Aviation Administration’s practice of hiring people with “targeted disabilities.” The FAA published a report contradicting this outlandish and unserious claim, saying that staffing in the air traffic control tower was “not normal” on Wednesday night when the crash occurred.

It’s also worth noting that Trump went on television to speak about the crash hours before he had actually briefed on the incident. Meanwhile, National Transportation Safety Board member Todd Inman said Thursday it is too early to tell what exactly caused the crash.

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Thursday slammed Trump’s claims that diversity, equity, and inclusion caused the deadly plane crash that killed 67 people near Washington, D.C.—and is drawing attention to the fact that Trump eliminated members of a key aviation safety committee just days before this disaster.

“The FAA [Federal Aviation Administration] is actively recruiting workers who suffer severe intellectual disabilities, psychiatric problems, and other mental and physical conditions under a diversity and inclusion hiring initiative spelled out on the agency’s website,” Trump said earlier in the day, alluding to this program as the reason for the crash. “Can you imagine?”

AOC responded on X. “I represent LaGuardia Airport as well as workers for JFK. Trump gutted the Aviation Safety committee last week,” she wrote. “Air traffic controllers—already understaffed—got Trump’s ‘buyout’ this week with a 1 week ultimatum to decide. It’s not DEI—it’s him. And Elon too.”

Trump is pointing the finger at aviation workers of color or people with disabilities, while ignoring the fact that he fired the directors of the TSA and the coast guard, and killed the Aviation Security Advisory Committee—all last week. The FAA chief resigned on Trump’s first day in office, thanks to pressure from Elon Musk, leaving the federal aviation agency without a leader during this crisis. It’s also being reported that Trump’s hiring freeze led to the FAA being seriously understaffed when it comes to air traffic controllers.

Trump has since doubled down on his absurd claims that DEI somehow did this.

Elon Musk’s next target in the federal government is its buildings.

The tech CEO and fascism enthusiast reportedly spent Thursday afternoon in the General Services Administration’s headquarters and met with the agency’s acting administrator, The New York Times reports. The GSA manages federal offices and acts as the government’s procurement arm.

Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has focused on terminating the leases of “mostly empty offices,” and this week touted its termination of three leases in a post on X.

“These are the first steps to right size the Federal real estate portfolio of more than 7,500 leases,” the pseudo-agency posted. And buildings may only be Musk and DOGE’s first target at the GSA: It also provides tech and contracting services for the federal government.

DOGE has already put the screws to federal employees in a takeover of the Office of Personnel Management, installing some of his own people at the agency that manages the entire civil service. The same is taking place at the GSA. The agency’s engineers were told to submit a recent “technical win” to Thomas Shedd, a Tesla engineer who was named the GSA’s director of “Technology Transformation Services,” according to the Times.

A Musk executive from his Boring Company start-up, Steve Davis, has a leading role in DOGE and has focused on the GSA. Previously, Davis assisted with Musk’s cost-cutting at X (formerly Twitter) and oversaw layoffs at the social media company, as his wife Nicole Hollander managed cuts to X’s real estate assets. Now, the pair have GSA email addresses, the Times reports.

Musk’s efforts to slash the federal workforce by copying a plan he used at X and forcing government employees to work in-person is already backfiring, with government employees trashing the plan and vowing to stay at their jobs. If most federal employees stay at their jobs and comply with the return-to-office order, DOGE’s quest to reduce federal office leases would undoubtedly create a space concern.

Musk and Trump’s DOGE efforts have run into issues as well, as efforts to collect federal employee data have been hit with a lawsuit over privacy concerns. Since the tech mogul’s track record involves taking action first and then worrying about laws and regulations, his real estate efforts will probably cause government headaches pretty soon.

Donald Trump is officially waging war on publicly funded journalism.

In a letter to PBS and NPR, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr announced that he was launching an investigation into the news organizations’ member stations, The New York Times reported Thursday.

“I am concerned that NPR and PBS broadcasts could be violating federal law by airing Commercials,” Carr wrote in the letter. “In particular, it is possible that NPR and PBS member stations are broadcasting underwriting announcements that cross the line into prohibited commercial advertisements.

“To the extent that these taxpayer dollars are being used to support a for profit endeavor or an entity that is airing commercial advertisements, then that would further undermine any case for continuing to fund NPR and PBS with taxpayer dollars,” Carr wrote.

Both NPR and PBS seem game for review.

“We are confident any review of our programming and underwriting practices will confirm NPR’s adherence to these rules,” said NPR’s CEO Katherine Maher in a statement Thursday. “We have worked for decades with the F.C.C. in support of noncommercial educational broadcasters who provide essential information, educational programming, and emergency alerts to local communities across the United States.”

In its own statement, PBS stood by its “noncommercial educational programming” and said it had worked “diligently to comply with the F.C.C.’s underwriting regulations.”

But attacking publicly funded media is all part of Trump’s master plan.

Project 2025, the authoritarian playbook for Trump’s second administration, called for the government to strip noncommercial education stations of their federal funding and licenses. Carr actually wrote the manifesto’s chapter on overhauling the FCC. After Trump announced Carr’s nomination, Carr pledged that the FCC under Trump “will enforce” laws that ensure media organizations act “in the public interest.”

Trump himself has repeatedly called to strip major broadcasters of their licenses whenever they fact-check him on his easily disproven lies. Publicly funded media, such as NPR, is no exception to Trump’s wrath.

In April, Trump declared in a Truth Social post that there would be “NO MORE FUNDING FOR NPR, A TOTAL SCAM!

“THEY ARE A LIBERAL DISINFORMATION MACHINE. NOT ONE DOLLAR!!!” he wrote.

Earlier this month, MAGA Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene threatened to drag PBS before Congress so they could testify on their accurate reporting on Elon Musk’s apparent Sieg Heil.

RFK Jr. had no good explanation during his Senate confirmation hearing Thursday for his past peddling of dangerous, anti-Black misinformation about how white people and Black people process vaccines.

Senator Angela Alsobrooks, Maryland’s first Black senator, asked Kennedy about his previous comments, made in a 2021 interview. “You said the following, and I quote: ‘We should not be giving Black people the same vaccine schedule that’s given to whites because their immune system is better than ours.’ Can you please explain what you meant?”

Kennedy immediately began to flail. “There’s a series of studies, most of them by Poland, that show that there are particular antigens that … Blacks have a much stronger reaction. There’s differences in reactions to different products by different race …”

‘I have 17 seconds left, so let me just ask you, so what different vaccine schedule would you say I should have received?” Alsobrooks asked, removing her glasses. “What different vaccine schedule should I have received?”

“I mean … the Poland article suggests that Blacks need fewer antigens …”

“Mr. Kennedy with all due respect, that is so dangerous,” said Alsobrooks. “Your voice would be a voice that parents would listen to, that is so dangerous. I will be voting against your nomination because your views are dangerous to our state and to our country.”

Alsobrooks is right. Experts say there is no validity to the study RFK Jr references. And furthermore, racial bias in pain diagnosis, or the assumption that Black people are inherently stronger or more tolerable to pain, has been hurting Black Americans for decades.

A preliminary report on Wednesday night’s plane and helicopter collision near Washington, D.C. contradicts Donald Trump’s favorite DEI scapegoat.

An internal report from the Federal Aviation Administration found that in reality, the tower’s staffing at Ronald Reagan National Airport (DCA) was “not normal for the time of day and volume of traffic,” according to The New York Times. There was only one air traffic controller to handle both helicopters and planes in the airport’s vicinity, a job usually assigned to two people.

Having to handle both types of air traffic can be complicated, the Times report states, because air traffic controllers can use different radio frequencies for helicopter and airplane pilots. In such cases, while the controller is communicating with pilots of both kinds of aircraft, the pilots may not be able to talk to one another.

Staffing levels at the airport’s control tower have been below adequate levels for years, like many of the U.S.’s other airports. DCA’s tower only had 19 fully certified controllers as of September 2023, according to congressional reports. This is well below the FAA and air traffic controller union’s preferred number of 30, and is due to employee turnover and budget cuts, according to the Times.

As a result, many air controllers at the airport work up to 10 hours a day and six days a week. Those levels probably have not been helped by Donald Trump’s federal hiring freeze, his gutting of the Aviation Security Advisory Committee, and the FAA chief’s resignation at Elon Musk’s behest. As much as Trump and the right might try to blame DEI or something else ludicrous, perhaps they should look in the mirror.

Robert F. Kennedy attempted Thursday to score a cheap political point against Senator Bernie Sanders by accusing the independent Vermont lawmaker of being bought out by the pharmaceutical industry—but he got his facts wrong.

“And by the way, Bernie, the problem of corruption is not just in the federal agencies. It’s in Congress too,” Kennedy said. “Almost all the members of this panel, including yourself, are accepting millions of dollars from the pharmaceutical industry and protecting their interests.”

“Oh, no, no, no, no,” Sanders said, raising his hand to quiet the applause that erupted from the gallery. “I ran for president like you. I got millions and millions of contributions. They did not come from the executives; not one nickel of PAC money from the pharmaceutical industry. They came from the workers.”

Sanders’s financial support from the health care industry stemmed from everyday workers, galvanized by his campaign promises of Medicaid for all and large-scale pharmaceutical reform.

“In 2020 you were the single largest receiver of pharmaceutical money,” Kennedy again insisted.

“Because I had more contributions from workers all over this country. Workers, not a nickel from corporate PACs,” Sanders continued, before he was cut off again by Kennedy, reiterating his point.

“Bernie, you were the single largest acceptor of pharmaceutical dollars. $1.5 million,” Kennedy said.

“Yeah, out of $200 million,” Sanders said, before reminding Kennedy that he had deflected from answering a question as to whether, under the “Make America Healthy Again” banner and as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, he would “guarantee health care to every single American.”

But Kennedy never had to answer that. Instead, Senator Markwayne Mullin interjected that Sanders had gone over his allotted time and was “battering the witness.”

Quiver Quantitative, a financial technology startup that provides data on insider trading and campaign contributions, listed no corporate PAC donors for Sanders—let alone any within the folds of the pharmaceutical industry. The company noted, however, that they do not currently track donations by industry employees.

Kennedy, meanwhile, has seemingly made a business out of his extreme public health stances. A disclosure form filed for his nomination revealed that the outspoken vaccine critic pulled in roughly $10 million over the last year related to dividends from his vaccine lawsuits, anti-vax speaking fees, and leading Children’s Health Defense, a nonprofit dedicated to spreading misinformation about vaccine efficacy.

Democrats on the Senate Budget Committee boycotted a meeting Thursday to advance Russell Vought’s nomination to chair the Office of Budget and Management—but of course, Republicans still forged ahead to put his candidacy to a vote.

In a press conference ahead of the meeting, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer explained that in light of the OMB’s effort to “illegally freeze trillions of dollars” for federal funding for grants and loans, Democrats would “not move an inch to advance Mr. Vought’s nomination any further.”

“Make no mistake about it,” Schumer warned. “As long as Russell Vought is Donald Trump’s pick for OMB director, Americans can be virtually certain he will try again to illegally seize funding for their communities.”

Several other senators also spoke against Vought, tying him and his work on Project 2025 to Trump’s efforts to undermine federal funding appropriated and agreed to by Congress. The sudden freeze appeared to affect essential government services, and officials in multiple states reported having problems accessing programs such as Medicaid and Head Start.

In his chapter of Project 2025, Vought had written about how the president could have the power to slash government spending without the support of Congress, and his think tank the Center for Renewing America, or CRA, has repeatedly pushed the view that through “impoundment,” the president can pause, or even outright refuse to spend, the full amount of federally mandated funding that Congress has appropriated.

“You know what makes absolutely no sense? Confirming the mastermind of the last few days—of the last few days of chaos—to oversee our country’s budget again,” said Washington Senator Patty Murray.

Democrats urged that Vought’s confirmation should be postponed until the crisis was resolved—and that’s an issue that seems far from over. After the first memo was published Monday, a second memo came out two days later claiming that certain programs that would clearly be affected wouldn’t actually be.

Then a district judge issued a brief administrative stay on the order, then OMB rescinded the original memo, then Trump’s press secretary revealed that it wasn’t a real rescission. Finally, a federal judge agreed to grant a restraining order on the whole thing. And this was just within the past two days.

Republicans on the committee voted 11–0 Thursday to put Vought’s confirmation to a Senate vote.

Kash Patel, Donald Trump’s choice to run the FBI, pointedly refused to answer a question at his Senate confirmation hearing Thursday about using the bureau to go after the president’s enemies.

Senator Cory Booker directly asked Patel about his past statements in which he pledged to shut down the FBI Hoover building and “replace it with a mausoleum of the Deep State,” noting that Patel had plans to remove specific people from the FBI by bringing in political appointees to an apolitical agency.

Booker’s question was interrupted by Senator Chuck Grassley, the Senate Judiciary Committee chair, who then asked Patel if he would like to answer Booker’s question, or “move on.”

“We can move on,” Patel replied.

Patel likely refused to acknowledge Booker’s question because the New Jersey senator had a point. The nominee compiled a “Deep State” enemies list in his 2022 book Government Gangsters, and would want employees loyal to him to carry out retribution. Fellow administration nominee Pam Bondi, Trump’s choice for attorney general, backed Patel in her own confirmation hearings and implicitly acknowledged his list.

With the previous FBI director (and Trump appointee) Christopher Wray resigning last month, it would seem that Patel has a clear path to take over the bureau and begin going after Trump’s enemies. But not only does he have to be confirmed first, he also would have to fight allegations of malicious prosecution thanks to his preemptive list. Can Trump and Patel overcome the Senate and the courts?

Donald Trump is suggesting that diversity, equity, and inclusion policies are responsible for the deadly plane crash near Washington, D.C., that is believed to have taken the lives of 67 people.

The president made the troubling claim at a press conference Thursday morning—even as he immediately admitted he had zero evidence.

“The FAA [Federal Aviation Administration] is actively recruiting workers who suffer severe intellectual disabilities, psychiatric problems, and other mental and physical conditions under a diversity and inclusion hiring initiative spelled out on the agency’s website. Can you imagine?

“Hearing, vision, missing extremities, partial paralysis, complete paralysis, epilepsy, severe intellectual disability, psychiatric disability, and dwarfism, all qualify for the position of a controller of airplanes pouring into our country,” the president continued on, reading an FAA diversity program that existed under his own first administration.

Trump immediately made the conversation about DEI rather than focusing on what specific errors occurred or even waiting for a single shred of evidence to support his ludicrous claims to come out. It became overwhelmingly evident that Trump will lean on his DEI boogeyman as a scapegoat for anything that goes wrong with any federal agency during his term.

“We don’t even yet know the names of the 67 people who were killed, and you’re 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 Kaitlin Collins said to Trump. “Don’t you think you’re getting ahead of the investigation right now?”

“No, I don’t think so at all.… The names of the people, you mean the names of the people on the plane … you think that’s gonna make a difference?” the president replied.

Trump was again pressed on his claims that DEI caused this fatal crash.

“I’m trying to figure out how you can come to the conclusion right now that diversity had something to do with this crash,” another reporter asked.

“Because I have common sense, and unfortunately a lot of people don’t,” Trump replied. He then alleged that he was going to fix this issue in 2020 if the election hadn’t been “stolen” from him, as he is still convinced.

This statement places people of color, people with disabilities, and anyone who doesn’t fit into MAGA’s vision for America firmly into the crosshairs of the Trump administration. It’s a dark moment in time when our president is trying to convince us that DEI caused all of this, rather than simply honoring the memories of those lost in this horrific accident and committing to taking the proper next steps.