The following is a lightly edited transcript of the January 31 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
On Wednesday night, a passenger jet collided with a military helicopter over Washington, D.C., leaving no survivors. On Thursday, President Donald Trump went before the cameras and blamed Democrats, diversity, equity, and inclusion training, and many other things for the disaster. He seethed with anger at reporters who dared to ask tough questions about his claims. We don’t yet know what caused this crash, but Trump’s rush to judgment is already demonstrating how he will conduct this presidency. He’s going to lead with far-right obsessions and tropes at some of the most critical and sensitive moments.
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.
Juliette Kayyem: Thanks for having me 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?
Kayyem: Yes. The why is still being reviewed; obviously it’s just been a few hours. On the basic facts, American Airlines regional plane collided with an Army helicopter. Conditions were clear, as we know. The passenger jet from Wichita, Kansas, was just about to arrive at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, one in a succession of airliners landing about two minutes apart, and that’s not abnormal for national airport. The Black Hawk was on a very typical training mission from Virginia’s Fort Belvoir. And we had been told, and I think the basic census, both of them were on standard flight patterns, well known for the D.C. area. And I’m quoting Transportation Secretary Duffy: This was “not unusual.” That’s why the investigation has to determine what, in fact, 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.
Donald Trump (audio voiceover): 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. Their policy was horrible and their politics was even worse.
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?
Kayyem: There’s been a consistent effort by the FAA and other government agencies to diversify their hiring. This is the criticism of DEI. I want to make clear that the FAA isn’t just a bunch of pilots. There’s assistants and custodians and all sorts of other employees. That effort to open the lens to diversify hiring was not illegal or atypical. And that effort by the FAA has been consistent through various administrations, including Trump’s, but he needed to latch on.
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.
Sargent: Well, you brought up the fact that the DEI programs persisted through the Trump administration. Trump read from an article basically saying that the FAA is actively recruiting workers who suffer severe disabilities, including intellectual, psychiatric problems, and other mental and physical conditions under a diversity and inclusion hiring initiative spelled out on the agency’s website. That’s more or less what he said. What’s he referring to there?
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.
The interesting thing about it is there were parts of the press conference that were bordered on a white supremacy aspect, this idea of the favored race should be the only ones who have these jobs. It wasn’t beyond the normal, but it was jarring to see it in its full flurry so soon into his administration and to see the pushback by members of the of the media who were in the room.
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. You have this really weird language creeping in that he probably absorbed from right-wing media as well. Your thoughts on that?
Kayyem: Yeah, the language itself is very, very telling about how Trump perceives fitness. This gets to the idea that you see, because you and I both follow it, from the right-wing blogosphere and social media, the Elon Musk, the deep population of whites. All of that gets played out with the bells and whistles that Trump was giving it today in its full fury.
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.
The second is I do write and work in the field of disaster and crisis management, so I know a lot about crisis leadership. The anger is a reflection of his fear. I’m not defending him, but there’s all sorts of metrics to determine whether Donald Trump actually has the mental ability to be president of the U.S. Some people wonder whether intellectually he’s as strong as he used to be. I don’t know, I can’t answer that question. What I can answer is having studied crisis leadership for a long time, the anger is a reflection of the fear that he has in this role. And I think We saw that during Covid as well.
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.
Kayyem: People say, This is what he does. He’s going to throw it out there, and now he’s gotten the orientation of the coverage in the right-wing world to repeat him. I’ve gotten two alerts now from major news organizations that are not about what happened or the victims or the horror that these families are experiencing right now or maybe something like, Hey, here’s a policy idea. Why don’t we ground all army helicopter training missions for a period until we figure out whether we want to have them there anymore?
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.
Sargent: I just want to clarify one point that came up a little earlier. When he talked about all these different people who are somehow polluting the employment pool at the FAA, who are inferior and whatever, those programs don’t necessarily really refer to the people who are making the moment-to-moment decisions that affect moments like this, right? That seems to me to be key. Can you explain?
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.
We have audio of the air traffic control room. It does not appear that someone wasn’t…. The helicopter pilot was notified of a visual concern. In other words, he needed visual on an airplane. He says he has it. We don’t know if he’s looking at the right plane. So in terms of miscommunication, the air traffic controller could have been more specific about which plane, or the helicopter pilot misunderstood it. Now that has nothing to do with any of the hirings that the FAA was looking at because in particular, all three of those positions—only three people who were in charge of that time—have to go through a training and standards process that are not diversity based.
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.
Sargent: Pete Buttigieg, transportation secretary under Biden, hit back at Trump for blaming his predecessors. Buttigieg said, “One of his first acts was to fire and suspend some of the key personnel who helped keep our skies safe.” We also know that the FAA administrator resigned recently after Elon Musk demanded that he leave because Musk was angry over how the FAA treated his SpaceX. What do we really know about all these claims here?
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.
Sargent: So Juliette, is it fair game to point out that this happened after those really recent occurrences? And is it fair game to say, Well, Trump keeps telling us he’s going to cut the living heck out of the deep state and the government, and he’s going to sack the civil service if it isn’t loyal to him? He has a certain attitude toward the “deep state,” by which we mean the professionalized civil service that really is revealed to be pretty impoverished by an event like this. Is that all fair?
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.
Sargent: His rush to blame DEI is really a way of saying, Well, government is getting polluted by the professional managerial class, by elite liberals who have taken their eye off the ball, who are just trying to help people who aren’t like you. And I’m coming in to knock heads and set all that straight. We’re going to get rid of all that. I want to play some more audio of two times Trump got angry with reporters. First is under questioning from CNN’s Kaitlan Collins.
Kaitlan Collins (audio voiceover): You don’t 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?
Trump (audio voiceover): No, I don’t think so at all. I don’t think … With the names of the people, you mean the names of the people that are on the plane. You think that’s going to make a difference? They are a group of people that have lost their lives. If you want a list of the names, we can give you that. We’ll be giving that very soon. We’re in coordination with American Airlines. We’re in coordination very strongly, obviously, with the military. But I think that’s not a very smart question. I’m surprised, coming from you.
Sargent: The second one is, I believe, NBC’s Peter Alexander.
Peter Alexander (audio voiceover): The cited FAA text that you read is real, but the implication that this policy is new or that it stems from efforts that began under President Biden or the Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg is demonstrably false.
Trump (audio voiceover): Who said that, you?
Alexander (audio voiceover): No, it’s on the website. The FAA website. It was there in 2013. It was there for the entirety of your administration. So my question is: Why didn’t you change the policy during your first administration?
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.
Sargent: Juliette, he’s just seething at the very fact that his sloppy response is being subjected to even minimal questioning.
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.
When he comes up to speak and to, I think, try to reset some of the facts and allegations made, he says—as Trump demands that his people say—the president is all over this and all resources will be delivered. But also he tries to fix it and makes it clear that we don’t know the reason why and also makes it clear what the investigation is going to look at and how it will unfold.
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.
Sargent: Very much like the Covid period as well where his underlings had to step forward and make what he said sound somehow responsible and just lie in everybody’s faces about what they had just seen from the entirely unfit guy at the top.
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.
There are flashing red lights where a moment like this could also be an opportunity to look at the future of aviation, aviation safety, to protect the American public. That window was about three hours. Trump just closed it. And that is the long-term consequences of having a president like this: He is not serious, and therefore the government won’t be serious about the lessons that we could learn from this.
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.
Kayyem: Thank you so much.
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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