President Donald Trump appeared to blame the Federal Aviation Administration’s diversity and inclusion efforts for Wednesday night’s tragic aircraft collision that left 67 people dead.
“The FAA diversity push includes focus on hiring people with severe intellectual and psychiatric disabilities,” Trump said from the White House press room. “That is amazing.”
He said that people who work for air traffic control need to be “geniuses.” When reporters in the room pressed him on what evidence he has that DEI was to blame, Trump responded: “I have common sense, OK, and unfortunately, a lot of people don’t. We want brilliant people doing this.”
At the outset, before blaming without evidence the crash occurred because of hiring practices at air traffic control, Trump said his administration was still investigating how the crash happened. “We do not know what led to this crash, but we have some very strong opinions and ideas, and I think we’ll probably state those opinions now,” he said.
Trump’s message on DEI appears to be the official message coming out of the White House — and not just one of Trump’s off script rants. One senior White House aide echoed Trump’s comments and said pointing the finger at DEI is just “common sense.”
“You don’t have mistakes like this if worforce standards are high,” the aide told NOTUS.
It’s the first major casualty event facing Trump, not two weeks into his second term, with the crash site and recovery operations taking place miles from the White House itself. It’s the nation’s first commercial airline crash since 2009, prompting questions on how the horrific collision could have occurred.
The president confirmed that the government believes 67 people died in the collision of an Army helicopter and a passenger plane over the Potomac River and expressed his condolences.
After a moment of silence, Trump praised the Coast Guard and started his remarks in a somber tone before reading headlines about DEI efforts and disparaging previous administrations. He told reporters that this is “an hour of anguish for our nation” and this was a national tragedy.
The collision occurred shortly before 9 p.m. between an American Airlines flight landing at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport in D.C. from Wichita, Kansas, and a Blackhawk helicopter completing a training flight.
Multiple members of the president’s cabinet joined him at the briefing, with reporters spotting secretaries like Defense’s Pete Hegseth entering the White House compound.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy told reporters — just a day into his own tenure — that the president was up until the early morning hours receiving crash updates from the Situation Room. He told reporters earlier that both flights were on their standard flight path. After Trump spoke, Duffy agreed that “when we deal with safety, we can only accept the best and the brightest.”
Reporters lined up in the aisles of the briefing room more than an hour before Trump was scheduled to take the podium, marking his first televised appearance in the James Brady briefing room since retaking office.
A few minutes after midnight, Trump posted on Truth Social asking why the helicopter didn’t change direction or move out of the way and calling the accident “a bad situation that looks like it should have been prevented. NOT GOOD!”
In his briefing, Trump continued to wonder aloud why the helicopter didn’t maneuver and how the helicopter’s crew didn’t see the plane on a “clear night.”
“Those warnings were given very late,” Trump said of the air traffic controller’s last-minute warning to the helicopter’s crew. “It was almost as they were given, a few seconds later, there was a crash. It should have been brought up earlier.”
Robert Isom, CEO of American Airlines, which operated the flight, said Thursday morning that it wasn’t clear why the helicopter was in the flight path of the plane.
The Federal Aviation Agency is currently without a Senate-confirmed leader, after the administrator quit on Inauguration Day — though a deputy was sworn in a day later. Questions from reporters focused momentarily on who from that agency is leading this investigation.
Trump also announced he was appointing Chris Rocheleau, a top executive for an aviation business association, as acting FAA administrator.
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Helen Huiskes is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow. Jasmine Wright is a reporter at NOTUS.