Two Trump Cabinet secretaries spent a White House briefing on a nationwide air traffic breakdown praising the president and blaming Congress. It prompted Politico founding editor John F. Harris to come away with a warning about Trump’s final two years in office.
“Do they have elementary self-awareness? What planet are they on?” Harris asked in a Saturday column. If Friday night’s briefing was any indication, he wrote, Trump “could become even more isolated from political reality.”
Harris told readers that he watched from a hotel near New York’s JFK Airport after his own flight was canceled. At the airport, he described a chaotic scene of travelers “swearing or sobbing, trying to juggle toddlers and infants or elderly relatives in wheelchairs with a phone to their ears.”
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, meanwhile, sounded “crisp [and] emphatic” at the podium, Harris wrote, but offered stranded passengers little practical advice and gave no clear explanation of what had gone wrong.
“The big problem, however, was one that is emblematic of Trump-era politics,” Harris wrote. “The content shifted immediately to argument and assertion.”
Duffy blamed Congress for moving too slowly on modernizing air traffic control and called for $50 billion. Harris on Saturday questioned where that figure came from and why Duffy was blaming lawmakers after Republicans had controlled Congress for nearly two years.
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin closed the briefing much as he had opened it, the Politico editor wrote, by praising Trump.
“He’s the greatest president we’ve had,” Mullin said.
“I encountered plenty of people on my weekend travels looking for reassurance and leadership,” Harris concluded. “But these words were not quite responsive to what they wanted to hear.”
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