Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Trump’s anger here was telling. It visibly infuriated him when his efforts to push those obsessions and tropes were subjected to even minimal questioning. Today, we’re talking about all this with Juliette Kayyem, a former senior Department of Homeland Security official during the Obama administration who has a new piece for The Atlantic looking at conditions that might’ve led to the crash. Juliette, thanks for coming on.
Sargent: This jet had 64 people on board and crashed into the Potomac River after colliding with a military helicopter at around 9 p.m. on Wednesday night. The helicopter appeared to be on a training flight. Juliette, can you sum up what we know so far on why the crash happened?
Sargent: So Trump immediately goes out there at a time when we really just don’t know a whole lot and blames Democrats and DEI for the crash. Listen to what Trump said on Thursday.
Sargent: Juliette, can you give us an overview of what Trump thinks he’s talking about there? What actually happened over the last few administrations with the FAA?
The unsophisticated nature of how he deals with complexity is while most of us in the field are looking at this saying, We have a normal thing. Lots of traffic, that’s normal. Weather was normal. No suspicion of anything weird. And then a tragedy. What’s the why?, Donald Trump thinks he can answer that with his right-wing infused media consumption. He tries to fill the airwaves at a press conference that, while nothing should shock me now, I think I had forgotten how bad he is in this particular role of crisis management. He’s bad at a lot of things, but everything from ... If you just go back to the Covid press conferences, this felt very similar to that: just a bunch of BS and then anger when those lies are confronted.
Kayyem: He’s referring to unbelievably generic language that is used in efforts to hire. The FAA needs bodies. We know that in particular after Covid or during Covid it lost a lot of personnel. And once again, they’re hiring for lots of positions. And once again, some of those positions, when you think about say mental disability, might include military members with PTSD who have skills that the FAA may actually want. This is the idea he has: of some elite group of people, all white, all look like Secretary Duffy and Secretary Hegseth, of this toxic masculinity being the smart, brilliant, the best of the best. And that’s his idea of who should be in these types of roles.
Sargent: What you’re referring to there, Juliette, is when he talked about how only people with really supreme mental superiority and fitness are appropriate in these jobs. yYu have this really weird language creeping in that he probably absorbed from right-wing media as well. Your thoughts on that?
I want to just add two things to this. One is it takes a certain kind of person to view their role as president of the United States in that moment as one in which blame should ever come into it. He could have had the easiest press conference in the world by showing sympathy and saying all the resources of the government are going to go to figuring this out and to making sure that the American public has confidence in our aviation system. Look, I could have done it. I’m not even president of the U.S. All the questions should have gone to Secretary Duffy. He can answer those. Then we’re done. The problem is even when all of us were sleeping through some of this last night, Trump is already posting about DEI and blaming Biden.
Sargent: Yeah, what’s going on here is that he is lashing out in a preemptive way. He knows he has no frigging business being up there. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about. And he suspects that the people in the room, probably rightly, are going to see right through his BS very quickly and realize that he’s utterly out of his depth and unqualified. So he lashes out. It’s all got this social Darwinist tinge to it. He lumps himself in with a superior species of some amorphous type that who the hell knows exactly what he means, but I do think that there’s a deep racial component to it on some level. He’s also asked at one point what evidence he has that DEI hires were to blame, and he said, “Just could have been.” Really sloppy shit.
This is, I always say about my field, not rocket science, but you can look like an idiot if you don’t know how to do it. As president, he always views himself as a passive victim of the very things that he should be in charge of. He did that with his statements today, and he does that consistently. He wants us to believe he’s just a viewer, and he’s pontificating as he said in that piece, Well, it could have been DEI. Sure, it could have been, but you’re the president.
Kayyem: Yes. There’s only three places where the error could have occurred, especially since we know that the circumstances were pretty normal: the pilot of the airplane, the pilot of the helicopter where there’s a lot of focus on what was going on, or something happened in the air traffic control room.
To be a pilot of a helicopter, you still got to know how to fly a helicopter. Just reading the tea leaves—and I want to be careful here because my piece in The Atlantic also talks about systemic challenges with our aviation system—given the focus on the helicopter pilot, we will be learning more about what, in fact, he thought he saw or if he was looking at the wrong airplane. There were lots of airplanes, lots of military testing going on. We don’t even know if he was new. Was this a retesting? Was this a retraining? We don’t know any of this.
Kayyem: They’re all accurate. Cabinet secretaries are often ... To me, that’s not a firing, you get a new cabinet secretary. The administrator of the TSA and the head of the Coast Guard on the response side—although unfortunately there wasn’t much of response, everyone perished—were both fired on day one, essentially. Day one or day two of the new administration. So you don’t have leadership at both your aviation and your response; those are two key parts of this as well. Over at the FAA, you have a term-appointed FAA head. The expectation, as we had understood the FBI to be but apparently that’s no longer true anymore, is that once Senate confirmed the appointment lasts for five years. Elon Musk goes on a rampage in December about an investigation or an inquiry regarding SpaceX and whether it needed to pay a fine based on some of its activities that were in violation of the safety and security of our airspace. The private space industry is also creating more density in our skies. Elon Musk says he needs to go, and he tenders his resignation on day one. So there’s no head of the FAA at the moment that this happened.
Kayyem: That is fair. That’s why Pete Buttigieg, who is only out of government for eight days, came forward so strong. There are people who commit their lives to serving the public who are just being thrown under the bus left and right. He did this just a week ago with FEMA. Remember? I’m going to abolish FEMA because he hears some complaint. Well, in a disaster, everyone complains. That’s not new. I think that it is fair game in terms of the choices that Trump has made about how he’s going to lead this administration and this country into the future. And it’s incumbent, I don’t even want to say Democrats, on people who understand the meaning of government in people’s lives to tell that story because we failed to do that or somehow that story wasn’t told well enough in the lead up to the election. So Trump’s able to narrate that government is the enemy until government starts paying your bills, stops paying for emergency relief, stops paying for health care, or the professional class who you want to be in charge of airplanes and Amtraks and our ports begins to leave either because they get a buyout or because life is intolerable.
Kaitlan Collins (audio voiceover): You even yet know the names of the 67 people who were killed, and you are blaming Democrats and DEI policies and air traffic control and seemingly the member of the U.S. military who was flying that Blackhawk helicopter. Don’t you think you’re getting ahead of the investigation right now?
Sargent: The second one is, I believe, NBC’s Peter Alexander.
Trump (audio voiceover): Who said that, you?
Trump (audio voiceover): I did change it. I changed the Obama policy, and we had a very good policy. And then Biden came in and he changed it.
Kayyem: Yeah. That’s a person who does not understand their role but also has so clearly surrounded himself with people and a media diet that only kisses the ring. There’s a moment in the press conference that I thought was interesting. Sean Duffy is the new Secretary of Transportation, I think he got in yesterday. He also had been on an MTV show but he also was a Congressman. So he’s not totally unserious, like he ran for office. And it was interesting because he clearly understood while standing there, at least in my view, that Trump was not fit to lead a press conference of this nature.
That is the responsible thing to say. I have no sympathy for Secretary Duffy at all, but it was a moment when I could see, and I’m just reading the tea leaves, a person realized that Trump 2.0 isn’t better than Trump 1.0. He’s worse.
Kayyem: Yeah. Can I say one thing before we end about not just the horror of this, and watching Trump, and the tragedy to all those victims? This country does have real issues about things like disasters and recovery, say in Los Angeles or North Carolina, and in our aviation system, which has had too many near misses.
Sargent: Well, this is a very early flashing light about what’s coming down the pike, and it’s going to get a whole lot worse. Juliette Kayyem, thanks so much for coming on with us.
Sargent: You’ve been listening to The Daily Blast with me, your host, Greg Sargent. The Daily Blast is a New Republic podcast and is produced by Riley Fessler and the DSR Network.
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