President Donald Trump is trying to blame everyone and everything but his own administration for the deadly plane crash between an American Eagle regional jet and Blackhawk helicopter over D.C. — and he has no leg to stand on, Dana Milbank wrote for The Washington Post on Friday.
"No one yet knows what caused the crash, but Trump didn’t hesitate to blame what he said were Joe Biden’s and Barack Obama’s 'mediocre' and 'lower' standards for air traffic controllers," he wrote.
"He blamed Biden’s transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg, for offering nothing but 'a good line of bulls---' as he oversaw the Federal Aviation Administration. And Trump blamed the FAA itself for deciding that 'the work force was too White' — and pursuing diversity in hiring rather than 'people that are competent.'"
In fact, as reporters quickly noted to Trump's face, the very diversity policies he is blaming were on the books throughout his first term — and more to the point, there is no evidence anyone involved in air traffic control was underqualified.
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But Trump's response, when pressed on how he knows "diversity" is to blame, was, “Because I have common sense.”
"If we’re recklessly assigning blame, we might just as easily point out that, before Trump took office, there hadn’t been a major commercial plane crash in the United States in the previous 16 years; that, in the week before the crash, Trump sacked the head of the Transportation Security Administration, disbanded the Aviation Security Advisory Committee, failed to name an acting head of the FAA, and imposed a hiring freeze that apparently includes air traffic controllers; and that Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) last year celebrated his 'landmark victory' in expanding the number of flights out of National," wrote Milbank.
Indeed, he noted, at the time Republicans expanded traffic at DCA, both aviation experts and senators from Maryland and Virginia warned that Cruz “decided to ignore the flashing red warning light of the recent near-collision of two aircraft at [National] and jam even more flights onto the busiest runway in America.”
But ultimately, Milbank concluded, we just don't know anything yet — and that's the point. "Can we agree to pause the baseless speculation and wait for the facts?" he wrote.