Political Negligence
Aerial view of Washington-National Airport (DCA). Image taken from Engineering-News Record.
Unfortunately, I come to you today with some horrific news. The news, of course, is that American Eagle Flight 5342, a scheduled domestic passenger flight from Wichita to Washington-National, collided with a military helicopter and crashed into the Potomac River.All 67 people on board both aircraft lost their lives. It is the first fatal commercial airline accident in the United States since 2009.
The blame game has started. To be clear, I am not an air safety expert, and I do not know definitively what the investigation will show. However, lots of people online (on both Reddit and BlueSky), as well as former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg , have been blaming the new Trump administration for the crash.
These people have a good case. After all, within hours of taking office, Donald Trump fired the head of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), as well as the head of the TSA. Additionally, he has instituted a freeze in hiring new air traffic controllers. You know, the people responsible for making sure aircraft don’t crash into each other in midair. If he replaces these people at all, it will probably be with incompetent loyalists.
So yes - they have a point.
However, I think it’s important to emphasize that if we were going to see a major drop in safety standards for American airspace as a result of Trump taking office, it would have taken a lot longer than ten days to really have an impact. And it’s not like it only takes ten days to become an air traffic controller in some of the world’s busiest airspace from the day you sign up.
Then again, according to this piece from The Guardian, the shortage of air traffic controllers in the United States has lasted for years, which is why we’ve had an increase in near-misses. We are understaffed in this department, and Trump’s decisions haven’t helped matters. But the problem existed before Trump’s second term began, so it’s not entirely on the orange felon.
The elephant in the room is Trump’s press conference that he gave about this crash. I can’t bring myself to watch it, but apparently he kept hammering home the idea that DEI has infected the aviation industry and led to a decrease in safety standards. Whether or not Trump is directly responsible for the tragedy, his rhetoric at the press conference was still highly irresponsible.
As troubling as this is, though, my main point today is not to argue that the tragedy last night at DCA is or is not Donald Trump’s fault. Instead, I want to use this case to illustrate how asymmetric our polarized political environment has become.
Imagine what it would be like if the crash had occurred while a Democrat was President. The Republican-controlled Congress (or even a Congress with a Republican minority) would demand investigations. They would summon the President in for many hours of testimony before every committee in both the House and Senate. Indeed, they’d probably be calling for the pitchforks, especially if that Democratic President had just fired the head of the FAA.
Hillary Clinton during her 11 hours of testimony over the Benghazi attack. Image taken from BBC News.
In fact, you don’t even have to imagine. That’s exactly what happened in 2012 when Hillary Clinton, then the United States Secretary of State, was blamed for the attack on the U.S. Embassy in Benghazi, Libya. Most Americans could not locate Libya on a map, if they’ve heard of the country’s existnece at all. Regardless, it is in fact a tragedy that four Americans perished in this attack. We should indeed have been upset about it, and Secretary Clinton should indeed have been called in to testify. This incident basically tanked Hillary’s future presidential campaign in 2016, leading to Trump’s first presidency. But I’ll get to that later.
Later in Barack Obama’s presidency, an Ebola outbreak occurred in West Africa. To be clear, Ebola sounds like an absolutely horrifying illness that I never want to catch. And the two American deaths that occurred as a result of this outbreak are tragedies. However, the 2014 midterm elections swung massively against the Democrats, and Ebola is a commonly cited reason why. This enabled Donald Trump to enter office in 2016 with as much power as he had.
During the first three years of Trump’s term, we were pretty lucky. There were no major crises affecting the United States that were not of Trump’s own making. In fact, I still remember watching the RNC last year and feeling like I was watching a film adaptation of Orwell’s 1984, because they kept asking the crowd “Are you better off now than you were four years ago in 2019?”
Of course, four years prior to 2024 was not 2019, but 2020, as the archived MSNBC footage that played shortly thereafter reminded us. That was the year when we couldn’t leave our homes without wearing a mask, or were at least advised against it. That was the year when refrigerator trucks held excess dead bodies of COVID victims. Overall, more than a million lives were lost in the United States from the coronavirus. The fear, the isolation, the boredom…that was Trump’s fault after he infamously disbanded the pandemic preparedness team in 2018.
A 2019 Twitter post from Joe Biden about pandemic threats, posted only a few months before the outbreak reached the United States. Screenshotted from Google Images.
Despite the tragic disaster that was Trump’s first presidency and COVID response, the Democrats were utterly unable to effectively saddle Mango Mussolini with this horrendous record in the 2024 election. They let him get away with claiming that 2020 didn’t happen, to the point where the pandemic was basically memory-holed. That’s why Trump won in 2024 - people didn’t remember just how much of a disaster he was. And their buyers’ remorse will only do so much good now.
Republicans never let Obama get away with two Ebola deaths, or Clinton with the four fatalities in the Benghazi attack. The fact that Democrats let Trump get away with over a million deaths from COVID-19 is absolute political negligence, and I’m almost as ashamed to call myself a Democrat as I am an American. I might even switch my voter registration to NPA at this point.
Even if Trump wasn’t directly responsible for this particular plane crash, he has far more than 67 peoples’ blood on his hands. And the Democrats let him get away with it. That’s the real story here.
