What America needs in a time of tragedy is leadership that calms and searches for real answers. Too bad President Trump can’t do that.
Donald Trump, you may have heard, became president again 10 days ago after a four-year hiatus.
In the four years from 2021 until last week, Trump campaigned for reelection strenuously on the suggestion that things were always better when he held office and that only he could fix problems he blamed on the presidents who preceded and replaced him – Barack Obama and Joe Biden.
Trump on Thursday, in the immediate aftermath of a deadly air traffic collision in Washington, D.C., returned to first-term form when he reflexively rejected any possible accountability for anything awful that happened on his watch. In Trump’s worldview, he is the driving genius behind any positive development but just an observant bystander when things go wrong.
Trump pushed that convenient incongruity from the White House even as first responders were still pulling bodies from the frigid waters of the Potomac River after a U.S. Army helicopter collided Wednesday night with an American Airlines jet.
President Trump rushes to add confusion to a DC plane crash
With no survivors expected, 67 people likely lost their lives in that crash. The investigation into how that happened has just begun.
But Trump has already arrived at a self-serving conclusion – Obama and Biden are to blame, along with policies that push for diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) in workplaces, such as the Army, airlines and the Federal Aviation Administration.
Trump responded with typical hostility and disdain to questions about how he could reach that conclusion when so many of the facts from this tragic incident were still unknown.
“Because I have common sense,” was his all-too-predictable defense.
Something terrible happened on Trump’s watch. So, someone other than Trump needs to be blamed. That’s what Trump calls “common sense.”
Trump’s constant need to deflect responsibility kicked into play just after midnight Thursday, less than 90 minutes after his White House media team issued a standard president-in-crisis statement – lamenting the incident, praising first responders and promising updates when available.
Over on Truth Social, the president’s social media website, Trump was asking questions in a 12:19 a.m. post Thursday, wondering why the helicopter pilots didn’t avoid the crash and questioning whether air traffic controllers made the right moves.
Trump’s not just another troll on social media. He’s the president. The secretaries of Defense and Transportation report directly to him. If Trump wanted answers, he’d be asking those guys. I’m sure they’d take his call, even after midnight.
Trump didn’t want answers. He’s a showman, framing the narrative around the tragedy. He needed to control the story from the start so that responsibility never fell to him.
Lydia Polgreen, a New York Times columnist, captured this perfectly Thursday morning while responding to Trump’s post.
“One of the paradoxes of Trump’s conception of the presidency: he somehow requires absolute and unchecked power, but also seems to think of himself as a passive, tut-tutting observer when the government over which he has that absolute power fails in any way,” Polgreen tweeted.
This is President Trump in times of tragedy
As we often heard during Trump’s first term, this “is a feature, not a bug” in how he approaches challenges and culpability. This echoes back to how Trump treated the unfolding crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic during the final year of his first term.
Remember how he called news conference after news conference to bat away suggestions that he wasn’t doing enough while always deflecting liability elsewhere? Trump, in mid-March 2020, as COVID-19 was spreading, was asked if he took responsibility for delays in developing coronavirus tests.
“No, I don’t take responsibility at all,” Trump replied then as he attempted (and failed) to shift blame to “a set of circumstances” in which the virus developed and spread.
This is as close to the truth – as Trump sees it in his distorted vision of our world – as he gets. He can’t – ever – be to blame or accountable. The circumstances are always at fault.
Trump’s administration wants the focus to be on anything besides them
And today’s circumstances are DEI because Trump had plenty of success on the campaign trail last year railing about the dangers of encouraging workplaces to hire people who don’t look exactly like him and his supporters.
Here, Trump tried to tap dance around liability but tripped up at his White House podium, blaming Obama and Biden for encouraging diversity in hiring at the FAA while insisting he wasn’t blaming the air traffic controllers on duty during Wednesday’s tragedy.
Trump also had trouble dealing with time as a linear concept: The FAA’s DEI policy was in place since 2013, when Obama was president, and was not rescinded during Trump’s first four years in office.
His pique came through loud and clear at that question – why can’t journalists grasp that anything wrong is always Obama’s or Biden’s fault?
To drive that point, Trump’s White House media team issued another statement with a headline that said he “wants the highest standards in Air Traffic Control.”
Don’t we all? But don’t we also want to know what happened here before jumping to judgment? Were the Army pilots to blame? Or the airline pilots? Or the air traffic controllers? Or some mix of all that?
Trump doesn’t know. If he had the facts to back up this unsubstantiated attack on DEI, he would have presented them from the podium Thursday.
All he has right now is your attention because that is focused on him because he’s in charge in a time of crisis. And Trump always needs someone else to blame when he’s in charge in a time of crisis.
