Give Trump some credit. He has no interest in faking empathy, as Biden did so ineptly. In Trump’s playbook, empathy is a weakness, even amid tragedy. Instead, each disaster is an opportunity to go on the attack, to ascribe blame on his enemies, to aggrandize himself, and to find ways to profit from the carnage, financially and politically.

I’m reminded of Robert Musil’s sprawling unfinished satirical masterpiece, A Man Without Qualities, set in what Musil called the “pseudo-reality” of pre-war Vienna. Trump is not Musil’s Ulrich, by any means, an insignificant man trapped in the machinery of a world going mad. Trump is Ulrich’s inverse, a self-inflated man driving the world mad. He is the man without empathy, who feeds off catastrophe, confusion and anxiety.

Thus, it was no surprise that only moments after an American Airlines plane collided with a Blackhawk helicopter near National (aka, Reagon) Airport and crashed into the Potomac, killing 67 people, Trump, constitutionally unable to console, went on the attack, casting blame before the bodies could be recovered and identified.

Last week, Trump fired 400 FAA senior officials, including the entire Aviation Security Advisory Committee and the head of the TSA, and froze the hiring of new Air Traffic Controllers. Now, an American Airlines plane collides with a Blackhawk helicopter outside DC, killing 67 people. But before any investigation can be done, perhaps because there’s no one left in the government to investigate, he took to Twitter to target the helicopter pilot and the air traffic controllers…

The next day, Trump scuffled his way into the White House press room and suggested that the real cause of the collision may have been DEI hires…

Reporter: Are you saying this crash was somehow caused by diversity hiring? What evidence do you have to support these claims?

Trump: It just could have been. We have a high standard. We’ve had a much higher standard than anybody else. And there are things like this where you have to go by brain power, you have to go by psychological, uh, quality, and psychological quality is a very important element of it. These are very powerful tests that we put to use that were terminated by Biden. And by a standard, that is the exact opposite. So we don’t know. We’re going to look into that, and we’ll see. But certainly, for an air traffic controller, we want the best, the brightest, the sharpest. We want somebody that’s psychologically superior.”

Then Trump affixed his grandiose signature to an imperial edict (which is apparently how the government will run for the next four years, independent of Congress), effectively blaming Biden and DEI for the DC plane crash.

One can only hope that none of the crew of the Blackhawk or Air Traffic Controllers were black, Hispanic, gay, trans, or women…They’ll be targeted regardless of any culpability. DEI will be the go-to culprit for any major government fuck-up during the Trump years, and there are bound to be many with this crew in the cockpit.

As Trump targeted DEI, the NYT reported that staffing at the air traffic control tower at........

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