After Donald Trump tried to blame Pete Buttigieg for the deadly plane crash in Washington, D.C., the former transportation secretary fired back, defending his service and telling Trump to be an adult and show leadership rather than find a scapegoat in the middle of a horrific tragedy.
“Despicable,” Buttigieg wrote in a post on X, referring to Trump’s batshit crazy news conference in which he blamed everyone from Buttigieg to former Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden, to people with dwarfism for the crash that killed 64 civilians and three members of the military. “As families grieve, Trump should be leading, not lying. We put safety first, drove down close calls, grew Air Traffic Control, and had zero commercial airline crash fatalities out of millions of flights on our watch.”
Buttigieg then said Trump bears some of the blame for the crash, as he is in charge and has already taken actions to make the skies less safe.
“President Trump now oversees the military and the [Federal Aviation Administration],” Buttigieg continued. “One of his first acts was to fire and suspend some of the key personnel who helped keep our skies safe. Time for the President to show actual leadership and explain what he will do to prevent this from happening again.”
At the time of the crash, there was no head of the FAA, as Trump’s co-President Elon Musk had forced out the previous administrator because the FAA fined Musk’s company SpaceX.
Trump also gutted an aviation safety committee days before the crash, getting rid of a three-decade-old safety committee that was created by Congress after the 1988 PanAm 103 bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland. Because the committee was created by an act of Congress, Trump couldn’t get rid of it, but he did fire all of its members, which will make the committee unable to do the work of looking into airline safety issues, the Associated Press reported.
Kara Weipz, the president of Victims of Pan Am Flight 103, said a statement that Trump’s gutting of the safety commission, “will undermine aviation security in the United States and across the globe.”
Aside from wrongly blaming Buttigieg, Trump also blamed diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts for the crash—even though he has no evidence that a DEI hire caused the tragic accident.
When asked by a reporter how he knows that DEI is to blame, Trump replied, “Because I have common sense.”
Reporter: You blamed the diversity elements but then told us you weren’t sure that the controllers made any mistakes.
Trump: It’s all under investigation.
Reporter: That’s why I’m trying to figure out how you can come to the conclusion right now that diversity had something to do with this crash.— Vince D. Monroy (@vincedmonroy.bsky.social) 2025-01-30T17:02:16.865Z
Ultimately, the investigation into what led to Wednesday night’s tragedy is just beginning.
But aside from having an idiot in the White House, the two men who helm the agencies tasked with getting to the bottom of what happened—Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth—are also not the brightest tools in the shed.
Duffy is a former reality TV contestant turned GOP congressman with no transportation experience. And Hegseth is a veteran turned Fox News host with no experience leading a major organization.
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