We presume that all readers know by now that there was a terrible collision just outside of D.C. on Wednesday night/Thursday morning, involving an American Airlines flight and a Black Hawk helicopter. All 60 passengers and 4 crew members on the airplane, and all three soldiers on the helicopter, were killed.
For a couple of weeks, we've been intending to run an item about a piece written for TNR by Jason Linkins, under the headline "Shove the Presidency Down Trump's Throat." That op-ed builds on a piece written for The Bulwark by Jonathan V. Last, under the headline "Democrats and the Ruthless Aggression Era." We did not expect these two items to intersect so clearly with actual news, but here we are. The basic argument of both Linkins and Last is that while Joe Biden was in office, the Republicans blamed him for everything, reasonable or not. So, they assert that it's time for the Democrats to adopt the same approach, now that the shoe is on the other foot.
That, then, is the genesis of the headline "Trump Kills 67 People." Which, compared to blaming Biden for, say, the price of eggs, is actually not as unreasonable as it seems. You could certainly take the view that it's a big country, and a big bureaucracy, and that a president cannot possibly keep an eye on everything. Or, you could take note that Trump (and Elon Musk) forced FAA administrator Michael Whitaker out 11 days ago, and also that the air traffic controller responsible for the crash was pulling double duty due to understaffing, and handling both civilian and helicopter traffic. Certainly, presidents (and other politicians) have gotten into much deeper trouble in situations that had far fewer of their fingerprints.
Trump instinctively recognizes when something like this might rebound on him, and so he and his media allies quickly went on the attack. In the obligatory post-disaster press conference, Trump decreed that: (1) Obama-era standards for aviation employees were "mediocre," (2) He [Trump] changed them to "extraordinary," (3) Joe Biden changed them to "lower than ever before." The President then asserted that all of this is the fault of DEI, and to underscore that this would be "solved," he promptly signed an executive order meant to assess the "damage" done to air safety by DEI policies. Needless to say, Trump offered no evidence for any of his claims. Still, his enablers at Fox jumped on it, and took the whole thing into crazypants land, asserting that the FAA was understaffed because the Biden administration was trying to fill self-created FAA quotas of deaf people, dwarves and trans people. You just can't make this stuff up. Although, apparently, the people at Fox can.
Obviously, the response from Trump and from Fox is absolutely vile. However, it's also an object lesson in exactly the kind of thing that Linkins and Last are talking about. Do Democrats actually have the stomach to run some of the ugliest parts of the Trump playbook against him? We very seriously doubt that the Party would ever stoop so low as the President did yesterday. But a milder version, where they blame him for the price of eggs, for the failure of the electrical grid in Texas, for an increase in opioid addiction, for whatever bad things happen in Ukraine or Israel? That we could at least imagine.
Although the leaders of the Democratic Party don't want to pin the blame on Trump directly, people a bit lower down but who are popular, say Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (D-NY), could say: "The crash happened because the control tower was understaffed. Trump wants to fire 50,000 hard-working civil servants and replace them with loyal cronies. How's that going to work out when all the air traffic controllers know nothing about aviation safety but everything about MAGA? And Elon Musk wants to cut their numbers too, although the crash happened because there aren't enough right now. And all this in service of tax cuts for billionaires." It could start quite a discussion. (Z)