Silence means surrender to tyrants. I'd rather be writing about other things than Trump's latest outrageous action, but I refuse to allow myself to be shocked into submission by the mountains of authoritarian crap that Trump is shoveling out in these early days of his presidency.
For as soon as the American public accepts Trump's completely unacceptable behavior as something that we simply have to silently put up with, that's the day our nation slides irrevocably into a dictatorship.
Today Trump broke new ground for a president, and not at all in a good way.
For he claimed with zero evidence that DEI -- diversity, equity, inclusion -- policies were responsible for yesterday's collision in Washington D.C. of a passenger plane with a military helicopter that killed all 67 people on the two aircraft, 64 passengers and crew on the plane and three soldiers on the helicopter.
No other president in the history of our country has politicized a disaster in the disgusting fashion that Trump did. With air crashes, it has been a universal practice to express sympathy for those who died and their loved ones, then say that the cause will be determined by the National Transportation Safety Board after a thorough expert investigation.
But Trump blabbed on about DEI being the likely reason for the crash, as you can see in this video.
It seems that Trump is mainly suggesting, completely falsely, that the FAA air traffic controller on duty was unqualified to perform his or her job, being a DEI hire -- though Trump also appears to be saying that the airplane and helicopter pilots might also be incompetent DEI personnel.
This is beyond absurd.
Today I heard a man interviewed on a news program about what his son recently had to go through in his quest to become an air traffic controller. The training is highly rigorous, taking many months, with lots of opportunities for being washed out of the program if someone shows they don't have what it takes to be an air traffic controller.
There aren't lower standards for women, minorities, or someone with a disability. When Trump spoke at the news conference about the FAA allowing the hiring of people with significant mental or physical problems, this was intended in part to encourage injured military veterans to apply for a job.
And those DEI-related policies were in place during the entire four years of Trump's first term in office, during which there were no significant plane crashes, just as there weren't any during the DEI-friendly Biden administration.
Accidents happen. The cause of this one will be determined by experts, not by Trump. He needs to keep his mouth shut when he feels an urge to politicize disasters, something that Trump did after the flooding in North Carolina and the wildfires in Los Angeles.
In this instance, Trump is adding to the distress felt by the family and friends of the pilots killed in the mid-air collision, along with the air traffic controllers who work at the Ronald Reagan Airport. Telling a national audience that the pilots and air traffic controllers could be DEI hires who caused the collision is beyond cruel, even by Trump's extremely lax moral standards.
Every day I'm proud that I voted for Kamala Harris. Those who voted for Trump now are seeing the result of their action -- the Liar in Chief taking a wrecking ball to the decency that previous presidents demonstrated after national disasters.
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