Crashed Planes

“All Trump really wants to do at heart is host a daytime talk show,” a Dispatch colleague observed on Thursday.

Which was a little uncharitable, don’t you think? Let’s give the devil his due: He’s done a lot more with his first 11 days of power than yap into a microphone. By the time you read this, in fact, he may have already started a major North American trade war.

But I knew what my colleague meant. The president is a performer by trade and a bloviator by nature, and he had a weird habit during his first term of commenting on the goings-on of his own administration as if he weren’t a part of it. To hear him at times, especially during the pandemic, you would have thought he was a random joe phoning into a local radio show to grouse about the government.

The disastrous collision between an Army Black Hawk helicopter and American Eagle Flight 5342 in Washington on Wednesday saw him suddenly revert to form. Donnie from Queens, you’re on the air:

The whiff of conspiracy in that mini-screed is vintage Trump. No one on earth is better positioned to have his questions answered when calamity strikes the United States, yet there he was, babbling about his suspicions before any facts were in. That’s the same mindset that led him to find Sidney Powell more credible on the supposed rigging of the 2020 election than his own attorney general.

But the sense of him being an outsider to his own administration is plainly there too. Normally after a plane crash a president would say something anodyne about “gathering information” and promising briefings to come, straining to show that he’s on top of it. Trump’s instinct was to accuse the helicopter pilots and air-traffic controllers of malfeasance, straining to show that he had nothing to do with it. Nowhere does his approach to his office break more sharply with his predecessors’ than with respect to Harry Truman’s maxim that “the buck stops here.” When something goes wrong under Trump, the buck always—always—stops somewhere else.

And so, inevitably, the first crisis of his second term also became the first instance of him regressing into a cable-news personality, spitballing his thoughts on major events as if it were a slow news day on Fox & Friends and he needed to kill airtime. Coincidentally, new Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth literally worked for Fox & Friends—and he too sounded curiously disconnected in the crash’s aftermath, promising “to assist if needed.” The Pentagon typically is needed to assist when an Army helicopter goes down, no?

Later Trump’s new transportation secretary, another former Fox guy if you can believe it, stepped to the podium. “Obviously, it is not standard to have aircraft collide. I want to be clear on that,” Sean Duffy informed reporters. To be fair, Wednesday was his first full day on the job; to also be fair, mumbling that midair collisions aren’t standard is exactly the sort of inanity a TV pundit who’s out of his depth might resort to if put on camera to talk about air disasters with five seconds’ notice.

If you’re choosing Cabinet nominees based on whether they’re good on television, you’ll get Cabinet secretaries who sound like they’re on television play-acting as high government officials. Nothing surprising there.

But on Thursday, the Fox-ification of the presidency took a more interesting turn.

When all you have is a hammer.

In his first press briefing after Wednesday night’s crash, the president told reporters that he believed diversity initiatives in government hiring were to blame. Why do you think that, he was asked? “Because I have common sense and unfortunately a lot of people don’t,” Trump replied. “We want brilliant people doing this.”

Hearing him blame an aviation catastrophe on “diversity” felt like watching him play a game of MAGA “Mad Libs.” Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs have become a core cultural grievance over the past five years for right-wing media outlets like, well, Fox News—never mind their own internal network policies. For Trump to leap to that as the cause of a mass-casualty event felt a bit like listening to a progressive blame income inequality for a cruise ship sinking.

But it’s what you’d expect from someone with a cable-news pundit mentality: “I don’t know how these things actually work so I’m going to throw some red meat out there that fits my ideological priors,” as one of my editors summarized it. Sure enough, Hegseth also quickly latched onto Trump’s claims blaming DEI for the crash, appearing on—where else?—Fox News to press his case.

The president’s grassroots supporters backed him up online as well. All they needed was to figure out how, precisely, diversity had made two aircraft go down.

Their first move was to check on the identities of the pilots, hoping to find one who wasn’t straight, white, and male and could thus be safely assumed to have been unqualified. And they hit paydirt: News spread on social media that one of the people at the controls of the Army helicopter had been transgender. The culprit had been found.

Except they hadn’t. The trans service member who’s being blamed for the crash wasn’t aboard, it turns out.

The next move was to wonder whether DEI guidelines had led to the hiring of an unqualified air-traffic controller who incompetently steered the two aircraft into each other. The FAA did start including a “biographical questionnaire” in its hiring process in 2013 in order to attract more minorities, it turns out—but it was dropped in 2018, according to Newsweek. And standards don’t vary by race, according to the head of the industry’s union. “Air-traffic controllers earn the prestigious and elite status of being a fully certified professional controller after successfully completing a series of rigorous training milestones,” he said in a statement.

A separate FAA policy was subsequently introduced to increase the number of people with disabilities working various aviation jobs. That was in … 2019, under President Trump.

Then came the third move. Lacking any evidence that anyone involved in the crash was a minority and therefore per se unfit, the Trumpist argument shifted toward blaming DEI indirectly. It’s not that diversity programs led to bad people being hired, perhaps, it’s that they prevented good people from being hired.

The air-traffic control station at Reagan National Airport was in fact understaffed during Wednesday’s crash, with the same controller overseeing helicopters also working to guide airplanes—a breach of protocol. That’s apparently not unusual, per the Times, as that tower has been operating for years with 19 controllers instead of the desired 30. Meanwhile, a class-action lawsuit is pending against the FAA alleging that the agency rejected 1,000 qualified applicants for air-traffic control jobs due to their race. QED, then: If not for diversity measures aimed at excluding whites, the tower in Washington would have been fully staffed and no one would have died.

It’s a theory, anyway. In practice, “DEI and any similar programs do not apply to air traffic control hiring, though—no one is given preferential treatment for race, sex, ethnicity or sexual orientation,” ABC News reported Friday, citing a former FAA official. Even the Trump-friendly Washington Times conceded that, as of yet, “No evidence indicates that DEI hiring played a role in Wednesday’s crash.”

Frankly, it would be weird if it did. Before this week, the last major commercial air disaster in the U.S. occurred in 2009. Eight years of diversity initiatives under Barack Obama plus four more under Joe Biden somehow hasn’t caused airplanes to fall out of the sky.

Trump would have done well after the crash to declare that America urgently needs more air-traffic controllers and that he’ll make hiring a priority for his administration, but his knee-jerk blame for DEI reeked of Fox News “pundit brain.” As the saying goes: When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. The essence of partisan cable news is to hand viewers an ideological hammer and send them forth in search of nails. If Trump is already finding nails on Day 11, it’s a safe bet that his second term will be even more Fox-pilled than his first was.

That goes for his staff too, of course, which increasingly resembles the guest list at a Fox News Christmas party. We’re about to spend four years watching Pete Hegseth, of all people, complain about others landing jobs for which they’re not qualified because their employers prioritize superficial traits over merit.

Saving the plane.

Needless to say, the point of scapegoating DEI for Wednesday’s air disaster is to shift blame from Trump onto his Democratic predecessors and, more broadly, from right-wing government to left-wing ideology.

Blame-shifting is his supreme talent, but at first blush, there’s nothing distinctly Trumpy about it under the circumstances. The first year or two of every president’s term is spent convincing Americans that the man who held office before him screwed things up so royally that the new administration deserves more time to deliver results. No newly inaugurated POTUS is so wedded to the idea that “the buck stops here” that they’d accept responsibility for a crashed plane on Day 10.

Trump does differ from other presidents in an important way, though. Blaming others for crashed planes is, in a sense, what his political movement is all about. One might say that it was founded on it.

The Dispatch Slack channel has been buzzing for the last 24 hours over a tweet. “Everyone has forgotten [Michael] Anton’s ‘The Flight 93 Election’ essay,” it reads, “but I was just thinking about it again and in retrospect you can make a pretty decent case that, with the vibe shift that we’re currently observing, he’s been totally vindicated, at least from his point of view.”

Anton is a nationalist ideologue who now works in the State Department, after serving on the National Security Council during Trump’s first term. Two months before the 2016 election, he published a famous essay comparing the mission of the American right on Election Day to the mission of the passengers on United Airlines Flight 93 on September 11. National death is certain if Hillary Clinton and her leftist jihadis remain in control of the national plane, he argued. They’ll crash it, deliberately. But if voters storm the cockpit and make Trump the pilot, we might survive.

This abhorrent nonsense, which led to Captain Trump frantically trying to steer America into the ground in the weeks leading up to January 6, 2021, neatly anticipated the demented catastrophist nihilism that the modern right has come to rely on to excuse every foul thing Trump does. If the other party is a band of terrorists bent on wrecking the ship of state and the guy who threw them out of the cockpit happens to be a gangster with several personality disorders, you don’t complain about his thuggery or racketeering schemes or what have you. You say, Thank God you’re here. I’ll do anything I can to help you if you save me.

There’s a straight line between that logic and what Fox News, the incubator of so much Trump administration “talent,” has become. Government by Democrats will crash the plane, government by a coup-plotting convicted felon will keep it aloft: The stakes in unthinkingly serving Trump are that high. The fact that enough Americans agreed with that, more or less, to have reelected him and begun identifying as Republicans can be seen as vindication for Anton. 

But there’s another way to look at his “Flight 93” thesis. Democrats did finally gain control of the plane in 2021—and it didn’t crash. There was plenty of turbulence from inflation and immigration, but the economy didn’t collapse. The country wasn’t attacked. You’re alive. There’s enough still left of America that postliberals can wheeze about making it “great again,” which doesn’t happen with crashed planes. The foundational myth of Trumpism by way of Anton, that Democratic rule is so grave a threat that we should let our pilot operate with complete unaccountability, has been exposed.

And so, for Trump, shifting blame isn’t a mere matter of a president trying to protect his approval rating. It’s existential for his political project. There’s no reason for Americans to let him consolidate power if they’re going to get the same sort of mishaps they’d get from a democratic (small “d” and large “D”) administration. “I alone can fix it,” Trump once famously said; if planes are crashing on his watch, maybe that’s not true. And if it isn’t true, why would any kitchen-table voter tolerate his nutbaggery?

That explains why he didn’t pause to consider more plausible explanations for this week’s air disaster—pilot error, a miscommunication with the tower, some sort of technological glitch—before rushing to point the finger at DEI. He has to explain somehow why the metaphorical plane in Michael Anton’s essay did not, in fact, crash even with a senescent Joe Biden at the controls. The way he’ll do it will be to argue that it almost crashed by blaming every new misfortune on Democratic policies, plausibly or not.

Wokeism is causing literal planes to drop out of the sky and into the Potomac! Left-wing ideology is so dangerous that Americans are actually dying from it—even with the left out of power! Trump would never put you in danger, you know.

The urge to burnish his reputation as a pilot so uniquely skilled that his authoritarian impulses and personal foibles simply must be overlooked even extends to his own first term in office.

Venture capitalist and newly minted Trump supporter Marc Andreessen recently complained to New York Times columnist Ross Douthat about the many vectors of progressive groupthink that Silicon Valley had to cope with over the last 10 years, from activists to shareholders to the federal government. Wasn’t, er, Trump in charge of the federal government for a chunk of that period, Douthat asked? Not really, Andreessen replied: “Like sitting here today, would you describe that Donald Trump ran the federal government between 2016 and 2020?”

I’m not sure how that fits into Michael Anton’s 2016 analogy—Republicans stormed the cockpit, ousted the terrorists, and … other terrorists took over the plane?—but this is how it’ll go for the duration of Trump’s term. Voters won’t support overthrowing the constitutional order unless they believe that what replaces it will be so much better and more competent as to approach infallibility. Going forward, whenever and however Americans might be suffering, you may rest assured that leftism is responsible. DEI is always lurking; all you need to do to find it is look hard enough.