MAGA's 'Flight 93 mindset' will leave 'little worth salvaging': Columnist

A second Trump administration with fewer establishment figures who understand the inner workings of government bureaucracy would not be worse for the country, a Washington Post columnist argued Thursday, and conservatives would also “find little worth” with four more years of Donald Trump.

Supporters of the former president view institutions like academia, mainstream media and civil service as broken, wrote columnist Megan McArdle, and believe Trump is the person to fix them.

She argues that the “Flight 93 mindset” – popularized by an essay in the Claremont Review of Books in 2016 – is prevalent among Trump supporters. The theory revolves around the plane “that was driven into the ground by 9/11 terrorists when its passengers rebelled and made a run for the cockpit,” which McArdle suggested is essentially what the essayist was urging conservatives to do at the time, “even at the risk of crashing the plane and killing everyone on board.”

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“Advocates of the Flight 93 strategy see a world where the left has gained control of the institutions that are supposed to inform, monitor and execute government policy — civil service, academia, mainstream media, professional groups and nonprofits. Elected officials set the rules, but the rules matter less than who enforces them,” according to McArdle’s op-ed.

She continued her piece by saying that conservatives are right in that “critical institutions are botching their missions and destroying public trust in their work. They’re just wrong that Trump can fix it.”

That’s because, according to McArdle, “even a bad system is better than the personal whims of a strongman. Procedural power might be abused by the left, but the procedures protect conservatives as well as liberals.”

She added that crashing the system isn’t likely to be effective “even in the short term," and "conservatives will find little worth salvaging from the wreckage."

"Instead of the patient work of lasting institutional change, we will get even more chaotic, impetuous decisions driven by whatever flattering lackey can grab the president’s ear, or whatever Fox News story has captured his fleeting attention," McArdle wrote.