President Donald Trump used a deadly air crash that killed three Army aviators and 64 passengers and crew aboard an American Airlines jet to attack his two Democratic predecessors and falsely suggest the tragedy was the result of diversity initiatives in government.
In his first visit to the White House briefing room since returning to the presidency last week, Trump initially offered a moment of silence for the victims and praised the efforts of first responders after the crash, which took place just before 9 p.m. ET at Reagan National Airport outside Washington.
Footage of the crash shows the two aircraft colliding in midair before exploding in a massive fireball. A massive search-and-rescue operation for survivors, involving multiple agencies, was launched in the nearby Potomac River, amid heavy winds and icy 42-degree water temperatures.
So far, 28 bodies have been recovered from the river of the 67 people believed to be dead, Chief John Donnelly of Washington’s fire and emergency service said in a Thursday morning press conference.
After the moment of silence ended, Trump called the crash “a moment of anguish” for the country and said there is now a “systematic and comprehensive investigation” underway, led by the National Transportation Safety Board, and announced he was appointing Christopher Rocheleau as the acting FAA administrator.
He then pivoted to baselessly alleging that standards for air traffic control recruitment and hiring had become lax during the presidencies of his two Democratic predecessors, Barack Obama and Joe Biden.
Trump also falsely claimed to have once again raised standards for air traffic controllers (AFP via Getty Images)
“We must have only the highest standards for those who work in our aviation system. I changed the Obama standards from very mediocre at best to extraordinary, you remember that only the highest aptitude they have to be the highest intellect and psychologically superior people were allowed to qualify for air traffic controllers,” he claimed. “That was not so prior to getting there … and then when I left office and Biden took over, he changed them back to lower than ever before. I put safety first. Obama, Biden and the Democrats put policy first, and they put politics at a level that nobody’s ever seen because this was the lowest level. Their policy was horrible, and their politics was even worse,” he added.
Trump also falsely claimed to have once again raised standards for air traffic controllers by signing a memorandum upon taking office which shuttered a longstanding effort at the Federal Aviation Administration to recruit people with disabilities to serve in roles having nothing to do with air traffic control.
Positions in the air traffic control system require years of training, special licenses, and annual physical examinations and medical certifications to ensure that controllers meet high-performance standards.
Continuing, the president slammed the FAA’s disability recruitment program for having sought out “people with severe intellectual and psychiatric disabilities” and falsely claimed that the prior administration wanted people with such disabilities to serve as air controllers.
“Brilliant people have to be in those positions, and their lives are actually shortened, very substantially shortened because of the stress where you have many, many planes coming into one target and you need a very special talent and a very special genius to be able to do it,” Trump said.
He then falsely claimed that the FAA website stated that persons with conditions such as “hearing, vision, missing, extremities, partial paralysis, complete paralysis, epilepsy, severe intellectual disability, psychiatric disability and dwarfism” were “all qualified for the position of a controller of airplanes pouring into our country” even though the requirements for controllers have long included specific physical and mental health standards.
Emergency response units search the crash site of the American Airlines plane on the Potomac River after the plane crashed on approach to Reagan National Airport on January 29 (Getty Images)
“The initiative is part of the FAA’s ‘diversity and inclusion hiring plan,’ which says diversity is ‘integral to achieving the FAA’s mission of ensuring safe and efficient travel.’ I don’t think so. I don’t think so. I think it’s just the opposite,” he said.
While the president would go on to further blame the Biden administration’s transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg, for the efforts to hire people with disabilities, the policy had been in place since 2013 without interruption, including during the period Trump previously served as president from 2017 to 2021.
Vice President JD Vance, who joined Trump at the briefing, also took time to blame diversity initiatives for the crash and suggested that the FAA had been lowering standards because the government has been attempting to hire non-white people for ATC positions.
“If you go to some of the headlines over the past ten years many hundreds of people suing the government because they would like to be air traffic controllers but turned away because of the color of their skin. That policy ends under Donald Trump’s leadership. Safety is the first priority of our aviation industry,” he said.
At the same time as he attacked the prior administration and diversification efforts for the crash, Trump also said he wasn’t sure that the air traffic control system workers involved did anything wrong with respect to the tragedy. He also suggested it was the Army helicopter pilots who’d erred in a social media post made shortly after the crash.
Asked why he was now blaming efforts to recruit people with disabilities, he replied: “Because I have common sense, okay, and unfortunately, a lot of people don’t,” he said.
He referred to the complex system of keeping aircraft separated in crowded airspace as “a major chess game at the highest level” that requires “very high level computer work.”
“I think it’s very important to understand that for some jobs, and not only this, but air traffic controllers, they have to be at the highest level of genius,” he said.
