President Donald Trump on Thursday slammed his predecessors and Democratic diversity measures and suggested that the Federal Aviation Administration’s diversity efforts had made air travel less safe.
Speaking at the White House press briefing room after a fatal crash between a passenger airplane and an Army helicopter on Wednesday night near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, the president also suggested he might make sweeping changes at federal aviation agencies. There could be firings “if we find that people aren’t mentally competent," he said.
“For some jobs,” Trump said, singling out air traffic controllers. “They have to be at the highest level of genius.”
The president asserted his opinion even though the crash has yet to be fully investigated and there has been no determination as to whether the FAA did anything wrong.
Listen to a recording from air traffic control the moment a military helicopter collided with a passenger jet at DCA.
An American Airlines regional jet with 60 passengers and four crew members aboard collided with an Army helicopter while landing at Ronald Reagan National Airport on Wednesday night, prompting a large search-and-rescue operation in the nearby Potomac River. The body of the plane was found upside down in three sections in waist-deep water. The wreckage of the helicopter was also found. Three soldiers were on board.
Officials have said there were no survivors.
In his remarks, Trump also targeted his predecessors, former Presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama, and former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.
"We must have only the highest standards for those who work in our aviation system. I changed the Obama standards from very mediocre at best to extraordinary," Trump said, without providing evidence or citing specific policy.
"And then when I left office and Biden took over, he changed them back to lower than ever before. I put safety first, Obama, Biden and the Democrats put policy first, and they put politics at a level that nobody's ever seen because this was the lowest level," he continued, adding, "their policy was horrible, and their politics was even worse."
“No, I don’t think so,” he said when asked if he was getting ahead of himself.
The news conference went nearly 40 minutes and Trump said officials would be releasing a full list of victims.
But he also said that who was killed wouldn’t affect the investigation into what occurred. “The names of the people who were on the plane, you think that’s going to make a difference?,” Trump asked.
The American Association of People With Disabilities responded to the president's remarks, writing on X that "FAA employees with disabilities did not cause last night's tragic plane crash. The investigation into the crash is still ongoing. It is extremely inappropriate for the President to use this tragedy to push an anti-diversity hiring agenda. Doing so makes all Americans less safe."
Trump's remarks were echoed by Vice President J.D. Vance, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.
"We want to hire the best people, because we want the best people at air traffic control, and we want to make sure we have enough people at air traffic control who are actually competent to do the job," Vance said.
"If you go back to just some of the headlines over the past 10 years, you have many hundreds of people suing the government because they would like to be air traffic controllers, but they were turned away because of the color of their skin," the vice president continued, without providing evidence of the claim.
Hegseth said that federal agencies should only "have the best and brightest in every position possible."
Buttigieg was quick to respond and call out the president.
“As families grieve, Trump should be leading, not lying,” Buttigieg posted on X shortly after the president’s White House news conference.
He noted that when he led the agency, it “had zero commercial airline crash fatalities out of millions of flights on our watch.”
