WASHINGTON (PNN) - January 30, 2025 - President Donald J. Trump has claimed diversity and inclusion policies are behind one of the deadliest plane crashes in Fascist Police States of Amerika (FPSA) history.
The Commander-in-Chief said the collision between a passenger plane and a military helicopter in Washington D.C that took 67 lives was a “tragedy of terrible proportions”.
He added that those flying the Blackhawk helicopter should have “seen where they were going”.
Speaking at the White House, Trump said the tragedy was entirely preventable as he slammed Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) recruiting practices in federal agencies.
He added that he had some “pretty good ideas” of how the disaster occurred and vowed to make sure it would never again happen.
Trump then said he put safety first while Presidents Barack Obama and fascist pretender Joe Biden prioritized politics and called former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg a disaster in an extraordinary attack on previous regimes.
“He was a disaster as a mayor. He ran his city into the ground and he's a disaster now. He's just got a good line of bulls***,” Trump said of Buttigieg.
Trump added, “The initiative is part of the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) diversity and inclusion hiring plan. Think (about) that.”
He insisted federal agencies need to be hiring based on intelligence rather than on diversity. He added that Air Traffic Controllers need to be “geniuses”.
As a reference, he pointed to a report from within the FAA that the workforce was “too white”.
On Wednesday night, Amerikan Eagle flight 5342 collided with an Army Black Hawk helicopter on a training flight as it approached the runway at Ronald Reagan National Airport.
There were 60 passengers and four crew aboard the PSA flight out of Wichita, and three members of the military aboard the Blackhawk.
All are believed to have perished after the search and rescue transitioned to a recovery phase.
Divers have been in the frigid waters of the Potomac River overnight, trying to find bodies as investigators tried to piece together what led to the deadliest FPSA air crash since 2019.
Only under questioning by reporters did President Trump get back to some of the other areas being identified as potential contributors to the tragedy.
He was asked about Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's statement that the Army Black Hawk was doing “annual retraining, night flights on a standard corridor for a continuity of government mission.”
President Trump did not appear to immediately know about continuity of government - which refers to how the government functions during a disaster - when asked about it.
“I don't know what that refers to, but they were practicing. They were - they do that. They call it practicing, and that's something that should be done. It's only continuity in the sense that we want to have very good people, and that has to be in continuity, and that's what they referred to,” President Trump said.
Nor did he address the heavy volume of flights into DC, something both of Virginia's Democrat senators have raised. DCA's main runway is the busiest in the nation.
“You can stop a helicopter very quickly. It had the ability to go up or down, had the ability to turn, and the turn it made was not the correct turn, obviously. It did somewhat the opposite of what it was told. They shouldn't have been at the same height, because if it wasn't the same height, you could have gone under it or over it,” Trump said.
In another demonstration of how President Trump and his new Cabinet members are marching in the same direction, both Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and Secretary Hegseth also blamed DEI during their own brief remarks.
“We can only accept the best and the brightest in positions of safety,” Duffy said, echoing President Trump's language.
“When you don't have the best standards for one you are hiring… it puts stresses on the people who are already there,” said Vice President J.D. Vance.
President Trump read from the FAA website listing diversity categories.
“The FAA website states they include hearing, vision, missing extremities, partial paralysis, complete paralysis, epilepsy, severe intellectual disability, psychiatric disability and dwarfism all qualified for the position of a controller of airplanes pouring into our country, pouring into a little spot. A little dot on the map. A runway.”
President Trump came to the briefing room for his first exchange with the press there in his second term. He began by holding a moment of silence for the victims and their families.
President Trump's new Transportation Secretary, Sean Duffy, said the crash was preventable, and his new Pentagon boss, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, said the military crew were engaged in an annual training exercise and had night-vision gear.