House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) on Friday denounced President Trump for saying federal efforts to promote diversity are to blame for this week’s deadly crash between a military helicopter and a commercial passenger plane just outside Washington.
Jeffries said the president’s comments were “irresponsible” and “shameful,” especially since the recovery efforts are still underway and the true cause of the crash remains unknown.
“It’s a very irresponsible statement that was made by the president,” Jeffries said during a press conference in his district in Brooklyn, N.Y.
“Bodies are still being pulled from the Potomac, children were killed, future ice skating Olympians were killed, future leaders in Wichita, Kansas, and beyond were killed as a result of this tragedy.”
Trump has stirred a storm of controversy in the aftermath of the fatal collision, which resulted in the deaths of 64 people on the passenger plane, an American Airlines flight that was making its descent into Reagan Washington National Airport, and three members of the military in the U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter, which appeared to be on a routine training flight above the Potomac River.
Trump wasted no time accusing the past two Democratic presidents — Barack Obama and Joe Biden — of adopting hiring policies at the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) that he suggested contributed to the disaster.
At a press conference on the topic on Thursday, Trump said the agency is “actively recruiting workers who suffer severe intellectual disabilities … under a diversity and inclusion hiring initiative spelled out on the company’s website” — language that was reportedly on the FAA website throughout Trump’s first term.
The president acknowledged that, with the investigation in just its earliest stages, the formal cause of the collision remains unknown. But he insisted that it’s just “common sense” that promoting diversity in hiring leads to a degradation of talent in the federal workforce — a dynamic he’s suggesting is the likely cause of the deadly collision.
“I have common sense, OK, and unfortunately a lot of people don’t. We want brilliant people to do this,” Trump told reporters in Washington.
“For some jobs — and not only this, but air traffic controllers — they have to be at the highest level of genius.”
On Friday, Trump appeared to shift the blame to the pilots of the military helicopter, saying the craft was “flying too high, by a lot.”
“It was far above the 200 foot limit,” Trump posted on Truth Social. “That’s not really too complicated to understand, is it???”
Yet he also doubled down on his argument that diversity programs are at least partly to blame, reposting a social media message from Elon Musk, the billionaire Trump ally, who had claimed that Biden’s promotion of diversity at the FAA was behind the disaster.
“This is just one reason why our Country WAS going to hell!!!” Trump posted Friday morning.
Democrats have different ideas, noting that Trump, during his second day in office, had fired the members of the Aviation Security Advisory Committee, a federal panel created by Congress in the late 1980s. The administration said it was gutting the committee as part of an effort to eliminate “the misuse of resources and ensuring that DHS activities prioritize our national security.”
In a separate move, the Trump administration has also offered buyouts to millions of federal employees in an effort to shrink the size of the federal workforce.
Such decisions have not been overlooked by Jeffries, who said Thursday that Trump’s team is “dismantling the Federal Aviation Administration as we know it.”
During his press conference in Brooklyn on Friday, Jeffries doubled down on those criticisms, saying the nation needs an inspiring voice in times of tragedy, not a president who just points fingers.
“We don’t need misdirection and we don’t need misinformation coming from the highest office in the land. We need integrity, we need decency, we need leadership,” Jeffries said.
“There is not a scintilla of evidence that exists to suggest that women and people of color are to blame for the tragedy that took place,” he added. “And it was shameful.”
