USAfrica magazine (Houston) and USAfricaonline.com, first Africa-owned, US-based newspaper published on the Internet
The United States President Donald Trump has blamed, without any evidence, the two most recent administrations led by two former Presidents from the Democratic Party, Barack Obama and Joe Biden, the new policy initiatives known as DEI (diversity, equity and inclusivity) at the Federal Aviation Administration and the Department of Transportation, for the January 29, 2025 plane collision near Washington DC.
An American Airlines plane crashed into the Potomac River after colliding with a military BlackHawk helicopter as it approached the Reagan Washington National Airport around 9 p.m. EST.
On Thursday morning of January 30, 2025, as aviation security personnel and other officials were digging and searching for any survivors, aviation accident clues and tech information, President Trump, In his first visit to the White House briefing room since returning to the White House on January 20, 2025, initially began with a moment of silence for the victims and shortly thereafter said:
“I changed the Obama standards from very mediocre at best to extraordinary.” Trump added “Only the highest aptitude. They have to be the highest intellect and psychological aptitude that were allowed to be qualified for air traffic controllers.”
“That was not so prior to getting there … and then when I left office 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.”
Trump falsely claimed that the FAA website stated that persons with conditions such as “hearing, vision, missing, extremities, partial paralysis, complete paralysis, epilepsy, severe intellectual disability, psychiatric disability and dwarfism” were “all qualified for the position of a controller of airplanes pouring into our country.”
Trump especially picked on the former Transportation Secretary (during the Biden presidency) Pete Buttigieg, calling him a “disaster”.
Trump said that “The FAA, which is overseen by Secretary Pete Buttigieg, that guy’s a real winner. Do you know how badly everything’s run since he’s run the DOT? He’s a disaster. He was a disaster as a mayor, and he’s a disaster now. He’s got a good line of bulls***”.
Buttigieg responded to Trump: “Despicable. 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 wrote on X.
Meanwhile, investigators by various agencies of the government have already started.
USAfricaLive.com
What record of air disaster during Biden’s tenure as president, one should ask?