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Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Not Being There

Published by Tom Sullivan on January 31, 2025

Is there any point to keeping count?

Still image from Being There (1979).

Remember when politicizing a tragedy was gauche? Not just among Republicans inside the Beltway but among Fox News hosts and right-wing talkers? Well, those tragedies typically involved mass shootings, often at schools. But a mass casualty event in D.C. involving an airliner and an Army helicopter in the first month of Donald Trump’s watch? It’s a perfect opportunity for the president to make political statements and display his skill at stopping the buck anywhere but his desk.

Glenn Kessler at the Washington Post documents that the president’s rants attributing blame for the midair collision on his doorstep this week to DEI policies were four Pinocchios-worthy (gift link):

In the aftermath of the deadly collision between a jetliner and a Black Hawk helicopter at Reagan National Airport, Trump held an extraordinary news conference during which he speculated on the cause of the accident. At length, he attacked former presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden for imposing what he called “a big push to put diversity” that he said weakened the Federal Aviation Administration.

Reading from a 2024 Fox News report — which he incorrectly identified as being two weeks old — Trump listed conditions that he suggested disqualify people from being air traffic controllers: “hearing, vision, missing extremities, partial paralysis, complete paralysis, epilepsy, severe intellectual disability, psychiatric disability, and dwarfism.”

[…]

But here’s the rub: During Trump’s first term, the FAA began a program to hire air traffic controllers with the conditions that Trump decried.

You can get the rest at the gift link. Suffice to say Trump’s press statements are epic bullshit, a word Trump applied on camera to former Biden transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg’s remarks on the crash.

In Trump’s first term, Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post kept a count of Trump’s lies and misstatements. The paper quit counting somewhere upward of 30,000. Trump 2.0 appears intent on setting a new record. It’s not clear yet if the Post under publisher and CEO Will Lewis will restart the count. But, hoo-boy, Trump’s comments on the midair collision had fact-checkers scrambling. They will have steady work until Trump finds a way to early retire them as well as tens of thousands of federal employees.

David Graham of The Atlantic notes Trump’s evil Chauncey Gardiner-ness for his similar obsession with television. Trump likes to watch. Then he comments profusely and demonstrates for the world that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He can’t even pull of seeming to be president and is clearly not interested in doing the job for which he was hired:

Marc Andreessen, the venture capitalist and Trump ally, has claimed that Trump wasn’t even running the government during his first term. During the worst of the coronavirus pandemic, Matt Yglesias notes, Trump was more interested in offering punditry on how the government was doing than acting like the head of the executive branch. And on January 6, 2021, according to federal prosecutors, Trump sat at the White House watching the violent sacking of the Capitol and doing nothing to stop it.

]…]

One vignette from the first Trump administration illustrates the dynamic. In April 2019, as the White House was juggling half a dozen serious controversies, Trump called into Fox & Friends and yakked at length about whatever happened to be on his mind until even the hosts couldn’t take it any longer. Finally, Brian Kilmeade cut in and brought things to a close. “We could talk all day, but looks like you have a million things to do,” he said. Trump didn’t appear concerned about it.

What’s odd is that even as Trump acts so passively, his administration is moving quickly to seize unprecedented powers for the presidency. In part, that’s because of the ideological commitments of his aides, but Trump also has a curious view of presidential power as an à la carte thing. He’s very interested in acquiring and flexing power to control the justice system, punish his enemies, and crack down on immigration, but he’d just as soon get the federal government out of the emergency-management business.

Those ideologue-aides and multibillionaire Trump backers have their hands so far up Trump’s back that you might see their fingers waggling in his mouth. Like the fictional Gardiner, they decided the simpleton would fit their hands like a glove and be a perfect remote-control president.

The Govs Are Getting Restless

Published by digby on January 30, 2025

Not happy and for good reason:

Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leader in the Senate, has reportedly been criticised by some of the party’s state governors for not resisting Donald Trump’s agenda and cabinet nominees strongly enough.

The exchange took place in a conference between Schumer and six Democratic governors that laid bare differences within the party over how to counteract a seemingly rampant Trump as he wreaks upheaval across the political landscape with an avalanche of executive orders, the New York Times reported.

The governors, led by JB Pritzker of Illinois and Maura Healey of Massachusetts, pleaded with Schumer to slow down the confirmation of Trump’s cabinet by persuading fellow senators to vote against his nominees wherever possible. They said the party needed to generate more public opposition than senators had managed in the chamber so far.

The appeal came in the week the Senate is meeting to confirm two of Trump’s most contentious cabinet picks, Robert F Kennedy Jr, as health and human services secretary, and Tulsi Gabbard, for the role of national intelligence director.

In response, Schumer said Democrats had damaged the political standing of the new defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, during his hearings, in which he was narrowly confirmed, and of Kennedy in the opening day of his confirmation hearing on Wednesday.

They clearly don’t agree with the “strategy” they’ve come up with to ignore Trump, capitulate on the border and crime and talk about “kitchen table issues.” They seem to think that the total dismantling of government as we know it might require just a little bit more energetic opposition.

Ky Governor Andy beshears aid that he focus on the desecration of democracy should take a backseat to a message about how Trump is hurting ordinary Americans:

Trump appeared more animated by the prospect of acquiring Greenland than on tackling the high prices of eggs and other groceries, which he promised to bring down on “day one” during his presidential campaign, Beshear reportedly said.

In fact, Schumer addressed the rising egg prices and the effects of bird flu and challenged Trump to act in a Senate floor speech on Monday

A floor speech!! Well never mind then.

Tim Walz wants more television appearances touting Democrats’ positive ideas and Kansas Governor Laura Kelly wants a “down and dirty” social media outreach. Schumer is Cory Booker, who is in charge of social media, is doing a great job.

The Democrats can talk about kitchen table issues all they want. And if they can frame them in terms of all the damage Trump is doing to average Americans all the better. But the only logical strategy is to oppose what Trump is doing, across the board, unanimously. Nothing Trump can do that might have a tiny bit of positive effect (a rare occurrence) that’s worth giving him even the slightest bipartisan cover.

Total opposition, daily press conferences stating their opposition and why, using massive social media presence (and not just X and Facebook) but podcasts, substacks, every single way they can to get out the word, speaking in one voice against the policies that Trump is enacting is job one. They need to express their horror at his Project 2025 agenda and be relentlessly persistent about it to break through the noise.

It’s not fun but it’s at least part of what’s needed and anything less is just empowering him.

I wrote a couple of days ago about the polling that shows people really don’t like Trump’s policies. And it’s true. But I listened to one of the Bulwark’s podcasts last night that had Sarah Longwell pointing out that while she hears that in her focus groups, she does not see much energy and intensity about it. People are opposed but they don’t feel very strongly about it.

Maybe that will change organically as this unfolds. But I think leadership from elected Democrats is required either way.

Update —

Here’s someone who gets it:

Yes, this administration is dangerous and cruel, but they are also shockingly dim and incompetent.Opportunities are everywhere. Make everything as hard as possible. Resist every demand. Refuse entry without a warrant. Don’t take the buyout. Their problem solving skills are 📉

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@aoc.bsky.social) 2025-01-30T02:35:21.637Z

He’s Doing It

Published by digby on January 30, 2025

“… meaning the lumber”

President Trump on Thursday reiterated that tariffs are coming against Canada and Mexico on Saturday, though he said the scope of those levies is still up in the air.

Why it matters: Canada and Mexico are the top U.S. trading partners, and his ongoing tariff threats have sparked fears of an economically damaging trade war.

In a question-and-answer session with reporters in the Oval Office, Trump confirmed his previously stated plan to impose tariffs on Feb. 1.

  • “Mexico and Canada have never been good to us on trade. They’ve treated us very unfairly on trade,” Trump said, adding: “We don’t need what they have.”
  • The U.S., Mexico and Canada have been joint parties to free trade agreements for decades, first NAFTA and then the USMCA.

Bloomberg is reporting that he’s going with the 25% tariffs. I haven’t seen that confirmed anywhere else. But it’s certainly causing trouble already:

Trump’s 25% Tariff Vows Send Canada, Mexico FX Tumbling

President Donald Trump’s renewed pledges to slap 25% tariffs on imports from Canada and Mexico on Feb. 1 jolted foreign exchange markets late in the New York trading session, sending currencies from both countries plunging against the US dollar.

The Mexican peso slid 1.1% and Canada’s dollar fell as much as 1.2% after Trump told reporters at the White House he would follow through on trade restrictions, which he’d vowed during his inauguration, on Saturday. The Bloomberg Dollar Spot Index erased an early loss to gain as much as 0.2%.

All because he’s mad that they haven’t properly licked his boots.

Enjoy your guacamole today because it’s going to be unaffordable before long.

He Owns This

Published by digby on January 30, 2025

As Aaron Rupar wrote:

All I know is that had President Biden forced out the FAA chief under pressure from his top adviser and his corrupt motives, and then the next week there was a plane crash that killed more than 60 people, Republicans would be howling that it was an impeachable offense.

I’m glad to see Democrats going after him this way. The Republicans created this blame game. Them’s the rules.

Meanwhile:

*sigh*

Elon Wanted Him Out

Published by digby on January 30, 2025

More on Musk’s interference with the FAA on behalf of his businesses:

The Federal Aviation Administration’s leader stepped down on Jan. 20, months after Elon Musk demanded that he quit. The move by Michael Whitaker means the FAA has no Senate-confirmed leader for one of the biggest crises in its history because he quit before Donald Trump took office. Whitaker ran the FAA for just a year but announced in December that he would step down on Jan. 20, as the new president was sworn in.

Nobody has taken his place. Last week, specialist aviation site The Air Current reported that industry veteran Chris Rocheleau had been sworn in as deputy FAA administrator, which would put him in acting charge of the agency. The Wall Street Journal had first reported that he would become deputy.

Whitaker’s departure came after he clashed with Musk, who is now in charge not just of SpaceX but of the new Department of Government Efficiency. In September Whitaker had proposed fines of more than $600,000 for SpaceX, prompting Musk to demand his resignation and promise to sue.

Whitaker, Space.com reported in September, told a congressional committee that the fines were “the only tool we have to get compliance on safety matters.” But Musk had kept up the attacks on X, at a time when he was campaigning at Trump’s side. On Sept. 17 he accused Whitaker’s agency of harassment, posting, “The FAA space division is harassing SpaceX about nonsense that doesn’t affect safety while giving a free pass to Boeing even after NASA concluded that their spacecraft was not safe enough to bring back the astronauts.”

And in a reply to a tweet by an Australian YouTuber who posts videos about space and who has said the FAA “should not exist,” Musk accused Whitaker of standing in the way of his vision of putting human life on Mars.

“The fundamental problem is that humanity will forever be confined to Earth unless there is radical reform at the FAA!” he tweeted at Marcus House.

By the way:

The FAA had already been wrestling with persistent shortages of air traffic controllers. And this week, air traffic controllers were included in the Trump administration’s offer of buyouts to all federal workers.

The investigation into the crash will be led by the independent National Transportation Safety Board, which is chaired by Jennifer Homendy. She has also clashed with Musk, over the safety of self-driving software in his Tesla cars.

Look for her to be labeled DEI and disparaged as incompetent right out of the gate. Only white males are capable of anything but picking crops and having babies.

Nobody said much about this when it happened a couple of weeks ago but maybe they should have:

QOTD: George Conway

Published by digby on January 30, 2025

Because they are evil, we must stand up to them. But because that are also stupid, we needn’t be afraid to.

Dan Pfeiffer has some ideas about that. This is one of them:

Here’s a useful heuristic for Democrats — if something makes Trump more popular, don’t do it. Confirming Trump’s nominees with substantial bipartisan majorities could make Trump more popular. Allowing him to sign a border security bill that Democrats only supported because they didn’t want to seem soft on the border (in an election that takes place in November of 2026?)seems like a bad idea.

It’s not hard. Trump should be at the apex of his popularity and he is substantially less popular than any newly elected President in history.

Here’s one way to think about making Trump and the Republicans less popular:

Donald Trump and the Republicans control all three branches of government. They are the only ones with the power to solve pressing problems or address people’s needs. Trump declared that he can fix everything and that America is in a “Golden Age.” He is responsible for all outcomes. Trump will take credit for anything good. Our job is to make sure he gets the blame for everything else. That’s certainly how the GOP and the media treated President Biden. During several news cycles of Biden’s presidency, he was hammered on the difficulty of buying a turkey on Thanksgiving or people’s gifts not arriving in time for Christmas.

What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.

Egg prices going up because of the avian flu? That’s on Trump. People not getting needed aid because of the federal funding freeze? Trump’s fault. Crime and disorder happening around the country? Trump. Chaos abroad? Trump. A collapse in the Gaza ceasefire? Also Trump.

The world has felt particularly chaotic in recent years. Part of that is real, and part of it is the refracted lens of social media. Trump won the presidency despite his flaws because he promised to make everything better. We need to hold him accountable when he fails.

God yes. All of it.

For instance, last night we had a catastrophic plane crash. Trump let Elon Musk fire the head of the FAA two weeks ago. It’s his fault.

The NY post (!) reports:

Federal Aviation Administration Chief Michael Whitaker resigned from his position just 10 days before the deadly plane and Black Hawk helicopter crash over Washington, DC, Wednesday. 

Whitaker — who held the post for only a year and had four years left in his term — announced he would step down after President Trump was sworn in, leaving the FAA without a leader in a time of virtually unprecedented disaster for the agency.

Elon Musk, a close Trump advisor who also heads the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) had called for Whitaker’s ouster after the erstwhile FAA chief proposed more than $600,000 in fines for SpaceX — Musk’s aerospace firm.

Dispatch From Surreality Central

Published by digby on January 30, 2025

But this represents millions of our fellow Americans:

Philip Bump discusses how COVID lies ended up helping Trump and how it’s affecting the way Republicans see the health institutions today:

After insisting with crossed fingers that the coronavirus wouldn’t pose a significant risk to the United States, Trump in early 2020 endorsed broad restrictions aimed at limiting the spread of the virus. The economy stumbled. His reelection bid looming, Trump reverted to trying to wish the whole thing away. He turned government officials such as Anthony S. Fauci into scapegoats, casting them as hyperventilating scolds.

The politics of Trump’s base are heavily predicated on rejecting authority, so the play worked like a charm. In fact, it outran Trump, whose support for the rapid development of vaccines targeting the virus became something of an albatross among Republicans who viewed the inoculations as left-wing nonsense.

On the right, the surreal narrative about the pandemic triumphed over reality — just as would the anti-establishment, conspiratorial narratives about the legitimacy of Trump’s reelection loss and the violence of his supporters at the Capitol.[…]

In retrospect, the right’s repercussion-free rejection of reality was likely one of the engines of the Democrats’ own grim fantasy. There was no obvious political price incurred among those who railed against mask-wearing or vaccination efforts. Perhaps, then, the political price would be an electoral one, a literal Darwinism that manifested on Election Day.

It didn’t. More than 1 million Americans died during the pandemic that began on Trump’s watch — and in the next presidential election Trump returned to office. He won in part by embracing the surreal narrative about the pandemic and, upon winning, tapped Kennedy to run the agencies that ensure vaccine availability and respond to future pandemics.

This will almost ensure that if (when) we face another health emergency the response will be much worse than it was before. But in MAGA Bizarroworld it won’t matter how many people die. They want to own the libs so badly they’re willing to die for it.

Obliterate The Line

Published by Tom Sullivan on January 30, 2025

Subtlety is not their agenda

I’ve long described the right-wing policy ratchet this way: Find the line. Step over it. Dare anyone to push them back. No pushback, or if it fails? New line. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

That was timorous, beta pre-Trumpism. The authoritarian goal today is no line at all.

David Graham describes Trump 2.0’s stumble over pausing funding already allocated by Congress as more than ineptitude. “It’s part of a carefully thought-out program of grabbing power for the executive branch,” and not simply chaos, but “a battle over priorities within the Republican Party.”

They may mismanage business, but they still mean business:

“The great challenge confronting a conservative President is the existential need for aggressive use of the vast powers of the executive branch to return power—including power currently held by the executive branch—to the American people,” Trump’s nominee to head the OMB, Russell Vought, wrote in Project 2025, the blueprint for a conservative administration created by the Heritage Foundation, a Trump-aligned right-wing think tank. The strategy is to seize power and dare both Congress and the courts to stop it. This tactic is unpredictable, as this week’s misadventures show, but it’s also relatively low-risk. The ideologues inside the administration want to see what they can get away with, and if it doesn’t work, so be it.

Find the line. Step over it. Dare anyone to push you back.

Returning power “to the American people” is a cruel conceit. That’s the last thing Trump and his backers intend. Trump’s motto may be “L’État, c’est moi,” but lackeys like Vought mean to use him as a front for their own power grab, starting with challenging the Impoundment Control Act Vought refused to commit to following during his confirmation hearings.

Trump simply might have asked Congress to claw back the funds instead of issuing his failed edict. He has the support there to pull it off, writes Graham. But seizing executive power is the real objective.

Graham concludes:

Because this effort is core to the ideological agenda of Project 2025 principals such as Vought, the revocation of this executive order likely won’t be the last effort we see along these lines. And having to back down for political reasons tends to make the internal battles only fiercer. Trump’s attempts to decimate the civil service and clear out career bureaucrats are well known, but Project 2025’s authors reserved special animus for those they expected to be on their side during the first Trump administration.

“I had a front-row seat on many of these issues and importantly [saw] how bad thinking would end up preventing what we were trying to accomplish, from less-than-vigorous political appointees who refused to occupy the moral high ground, particularly in the first two years of the president’s administration,” Vought said in a 2023 speech. He has no intention of letting that happen again.

We’re not in Kansas anymore. Brace yourselves for a particularly Orwellian period in which the cure for bad thinking is right-thinking, as with fringe ideologues it always is. Occupying “the moral high ground” transmits a darker, dog-whistle meaning most Americans will not catch. Its meaning has nothing to do with preserving the republic for which the flag stands, or did, any more than a MAGA hat means “patriot.”

The civil war of which the right has long dreamt and for which cosplaying militiamen have long armed themselves is here. But it is a cold one not fought with AR-15s but with a string of proxy battles and political power plays meant to whittle away at the republic from the edges, Ho Chi Minh-style.

A smaht, I say, a smaht chicken would be more subtle so as not to be so obvious in Washington. But these amped-up testosterone junkies are mini-Lokis not interested in subterfuge. They want conquest and want to be seen doing it.

Tony Stark: Yeah, divide and conquer is great, but he knows he has to take us out to win, right? THAT’S what he wants. He wants to beat us, he wants to be seen doing it. He wants an audience.

Steve Rogers: Right. I caught his act at Stuttgart.

Tony Stark: Yeah, that was just previews. This is – this is opening night. And Loki, he’s a full-tilt diva, right? He wants flowers, he wants parades. He wants a monument built to the skies with his name plastered…

[Stark pauses; he and Rogers look at each other knowingly]

Tony Stark: Sonofabitch!

What Are Little Nazis Made Of?

Published by Tom Sullivan on January 30, 2025

They don’t sprout from thin air

https://digbysblog.net/2021/07/28/coterminous-with-fascism/

The roll-out of Trump 2.0’s “shock and awe” effort has been pretty rocky. This week’s attempt by Trump to “pause” billions in spending on Donald’s whim caused mass chaos across the land. There was enough backlash and a court order pausing the pause that the administration covered up its backtracking by announcing it had rescinded the memo announcing the pause but not the executive commands behind it. (Never admit mistakes.)

Yet already one sees critics taking solace in the apparent inability of the Project 2025 team to implement it’s 900-page vision for remaking America as a white-Christian-nationalist dictatorship. But they won’t stop. Ideologues like these are relentless and committed.

Wired reports that “the highest ranks of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM)—essentially the human resources function for the entire federal government—are now controlled by people with connections to Musk” and to tech industry movers like JD Vance mentor, billionaire Peter Thiel. Indeed, many have noticed that OPM’s “Fork in the Road” memo seems to be a cut-and-paste job from a RIF memo issued by Musk to Twitter employees after his takeover. This controversy came after the directive to quash all DEI efforts:

Last week, federal employees across the government received emails encouraging them to turn in colleagues who they believed to be working on diversity, equity, inclusion, and access initiatives (DEIA) to the OPM via the email address DEIAtruth@opm.gov.

“This reminded me,” says Kelman, “of the Soviet Stalinism of turning in your friends to the government.”

While the country was captivated by the “cruelty and loyalty” show Trump made of signing executive orders prepared by ideologues in his orbit, it begins to seem more obvious that the easily manipulated Trump is merely a Trojan horse for an oligarch class flirting with dictatorship.

The parallels between Trump 2.0 and another dictatorial regime have not gone unnoticed. In particular, one clip Rachel Maddow used in her fall profile of JD Vance began spinning out online last night. “We need a De-Ba’athification program….”

One recalls the hubris of the Bush ideologues who implemented the De-Ba’athification program in Iraq. And how well that worked out. One might find that abject failure encouraging except for the chaos Bush-Cheney unleashed from Syria to Afghanistan. Not to mention hundreds of thousands dead.

Maddow’s review of Vance’s history includes his taking a lot of his ideas not only from Peter Thiel, but from “self-described monarchist Curtis Yarvin.” Quoth Yarvin, “If Americans want to change their government, they are going top have to get over their dictator phobia.” (They don’t want to govern. They want to rule.)

Those looking forward to Trump’s passing of natural causes may need to rethink that. Because then we get Musk-Thiel-Yarvin in the guise of JD Vance. The broligarchs are trying to implement their agenda now under Trump the Ignorant and with the useful-idiot assistance of white-Christian-nationalists. They’ll all have more free reign — and I use the term purposefully — under Vance.

Who Needs ‘Em?

Published by digby on January 29, 2025

Last week:

Tonight:

Aviation expert James Fallows wrote last night:

There appears to have been a disastrous collision between a regional jet, a CRJ made by Bombardier and flown by American Eagle Airlines, with more than 60 people aboard en route from Wichita, and a military helicopter, reportedly a Blackhawk flown as “VIP Transport” by the US Army. News footage from local TV stations captured the collision, for instance this from local NBC news.

The news is tragic and still unfolding. As in all aviation disasters, early reports can be misleading; I’ll follow up with more details tomorrow, as more become known.

The most recent mass-fatality crash had been almost 16 years ago. That was in February, 2009, when the crew of a Colgan regional jet, a feeder for United Airlines, apparently mis-managed an icing emergency, and crashed on approach to Buffalo, New York.

Since then, the relentlessly safety-minded collaborative culture of the US air travel system has made commercial airline travel in the United States the safest mode of travel ever invented. Not counting today, a total of two people had died in US airline accidents (over more than 12 billion passenger journeys) in the preceding 15+ years.

Now, tragically, that record is at its end.

On his second day in office, as part of his careless-or-intentional destruction of the institutions that have made the United States strong and safe, Donald Trump disbanded a group called the Aviation Security Advisory Committee.

As I had planned to write that day, this casually punitive gesture had the potential of undermining everything that had made US aviation safety the marvel of the world. It was collaborative; it combined public, private, military, civilian, academic, and other institutions to pool knowledge; it avoided blame; but it focused relentlessly on lessons learned. You can see a list of its members here.

I didn’t write about it that day, because life got in the way in various forms. But if I had I would have said: Destroying this institution probably won’t make a difference this week. Or this month. Or maybe even this year. But in the long run, some day, it will be part of an erosion of safety —part of the thoughtless destruction of the taken-for-granted institutions that have made modern as safe as it is.

That dismantling order, one week ago, wasn’t part of tonight’s tragedy—whose specific origins no one knows, as I write. But unless reversed, it will be part of tragedies in the future.

Nothing is perfect and accidents happen. But the dismantling of expertise that we are embarking on as a country is going to make them much more likely in many realms of everyday life. Elon Musk’s delusions of grandeur can’t keep American safe.

Update—

Trump blamed DEI:

President Donald Trump on Thursday blasted former President Joe Biden and Democratic diversity measures after a midair collision between an American Airlines regional jet and an Army Black Hawk helicopter above Washington, D.C., the night before.

Trump, speaking at the White House, claimed that DEI “could have been” to blame for the collision, the deadliest U.S. plane crash since November 2001.

Trump did not provide evidence that the Biden-era efforts had anything to do with the crash, and criticized a reporter who asked if he was getting ahead of the investigation.

The comments showed the president quickly reverting to well-worn attacks on his political enemies after initially striking a somber tone and offering condolences to the victims and their families.

Trump at the press briefing also said he was appointing Christopher Rocheleau as “acting commissioner” of the Federal Aviation Administration.

At the time of the incident, the FAA did not have a permanent head. The agency’s former administrator, Mike Whitaker, stepped down on Jan. 20, the day Trump took office. Rocheleau had been serving as the FAA’s deputy administrator since Jan. 21.

It looks like we’re going to have four years of blaming women, Black, Brown and LGBTQ people for everything that goes wrong in this world.