No. of Recommendations: 4
From Slate's The Surge:
Donald Trump
When all you have is a DEI hammer …
Tragedy struck Washington Wednesday night as a military helicopter collided with a commercial plane, sending both into the Potomac River and leaving no survivors. At first, the coordinated response between the D.C., Virginia, and federal government responders and officeholders was efficient, with each respective party offering its condolences to the families as the recovery and investigative efforts continued. The president’s press team even initially put out a grown-up statement. And then there was our president himself. He first sent out a midnight post just asking questions about why the helicopter seemed to be so intent on flying into the plane. By midday Thursday, though, the White House had settled on a message more along the lines of Betcha the pilot was a Black guy? The administration’s assault on diversity, equity, and inclusion has been a passion of these opening weeks. Trump said in a press conference that it was “common sense” to speculate that the accident was the fault of DEI policies, though he had no information whatsoever to back this up. Trump then signed a whipped-up executive action super-extra directing the Federal Aviation Administration to get to the bottom of all this diversity business, now that it is, in Trump’s mind, crashing planes. In practicality, what he was doing was trying to shape a distracting narrative before it registered with people that in only the second week of Trump’s presidency, we’ve had the first commercial plane crash in the United States in 16 years.
