Is there any point to keeping count?
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.
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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.