Trump Blames Helicopter Pilot, DEI Policy, and Biden for DCA Crash

The occasion for President Donald Trump’s first appearance in the briefing room since returning to the White House was a tragedy – the midair collision between an American Airlines passenger jet and an Army Blackhawk helicopter. “Sadly, there are no survivors,” he said after a moment of silence.

Trump assesses the likely influences leading to the fatal crash

“We do not know what led to this crash,” the president continued, “but we have some very strong opinions and ideas.” Chief among those initial suspicions: the helicopter pilot who did not see the jet on a collision course, and the diversity, equity, and inclusion policies of his Democratic predecessors.

Trump alleged that the disaster was the result of a systemic dearth of “common sense.”

The helicopter pilot lacked it, as demonstrated by a failure to adjust course, the president claimed. “You could have slowed down the helicopter, you could have stopped the helicopter, you could have gone straight up [or] straight down,” he said. But instead, “for some reason, it just kept going.”

His predecessors lacked common sense also, as demonstrated by lowering the standards at the Federal Aviation Administration, Trump alleged. During his first week in office, he signed an order directing the Transportation Department and FAA to “stop Biden DEI hiring programs.” He alternatively blamed former President Obama for lessening standards and then former President Biden for rescinding his own order heightening them. “I put safety first, Obama, Biden, and the Democrats put policy first,” he told reporters, “and they put politics at a level that nobody’s ever seen because this was the lowest level.”

Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg condemned the remarks as “despicable,” writing on social media that

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.

<blockquote class=”twitter-tweet”><p lang=”en” dir=”ltr”>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. <br>President Trump now oversees the military and the…</p>&mdash; Pete Buttigieg (@PeteButtigieg) <a href=”https://twitter.com/PeteButtigieg/status/1885013865676562491?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>January 30, 2025</a></blockquote> <script async src=”https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js” charset=”utf-8″></script>

Perspectives, statistical and ideological

Air travel in the U.S. is considered the gold standard in terms of safety. Fatalities are rare. The last commercial crash that resulted in a major loss of life occurred more than a decade ago, in 2009, when a passenger jet stalled while attempting to land in Buffalo, New York. Forty-nine people were killed. There have been recorded near misses but not crashes like the one that occurred Wednesday night over the Potomac River just outside of Washington, D.C.

There is no evidence as of publication that either the helicopter pilot, the airline pilots, or the air traffic controller involved in the incident were elevated to their positions because of public or private DEI policies. But rooting out that ideology has been a hallmark of Trump’s administration thus far, and the president did not hold back from offering a broadside against the policies.

He seemed to cite how the FAA had first added a biographical questionnaire to the application process in 2014; pointed to a 2018 lawsuit against that agency that alleged the federal aviation workforce was “too white”; and condemned a Biden-era “diversity and inclusion” plan from 2024 that sought to bring individuals with “severe intellectual” disabilities into the federal aviation workforce.

Asked directly how he concluded that such hiring practices could have contributed to the recent crash, Trump replied, “Because I have common sense, okay? And unfortunately, a lot of people don’t.” 

How to prevent a crash

“We want brilliant people doing this. This is a major chess game at the highest level,” he said of air traffic controllers, “when you have 60 planes coming in during a short period of time, and they’re all coming in different directions, and you’re dealing with very high-level computer work and very complex computers.”

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and Vice President J.D. Vance accompanied the president, and one by one, each reiterated his argument.

“We can only accept the best and the brightest in positions of safety that impact the lives of our loved ones, our family members,” Duffy said. Added Hegseth, “The era of DEI is gone at the Defense Department, and we need the best and brightest, whether it’s in our air traffic control or whether it’s in our generals or whether it’s throughout government.”

From the Vice-President

It was the vice president who broadened the argument. “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,” Vance told reporters, “but on the other hand, it puts stress on the people who are already there.” Moving forward, he insisted, the administration would emphasize putting “people at air traffic control who are actually competent to do the job.”

Referring to the timeline that the president had referenced, the vice president concluded, “Over the past 10 years, you have many hundreds of people suing the government because they would like to be air traffic controllers, but they were turned away because of the color of their skin.” He vowed those policies would end immediately.

In the meantime, RealClearPolitics asked, should the American public feel hesitant to fly? Replied the president at the end of the press conference, “No, not at all. I do not hesitate to fly. This is something that it’s been many years that something like this has happened.”

This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.