‘This guy is insane’: Trump is torn into by a former Republican representative over disgusting press conference

An American Airlines crash claimed the lives of 67 people, and Donald Trump responded by giving advice on how to fly helicopters.

The president does not, in fact, know how to fly a helicopter. Trump’s ignorant and unsolicited advice made up one small part of his ghoulish press conference held after the tragedy. At 9pm on Jan. 29, an American Airlines jet departing from Washington, D.C. collided with a military helicopter in midair, sending both aircraft plummeting into the Potomac River below. There were no survivors.

Trump claims to know how the disaster could have been prevented. “There were no adjustments made,” he rambled to reporters, the public, and the grieving loved ones of the lost. “You could have slowed down the helicopter. You could have stopped the helicopter. You could have gone up, you could have gone down, you could have gone straight up, straight down… you could have done a million different manuevers ” said the president, who obviously didn’t have the foggiest idea what he was talking about.

The response on X? “We’re really f**king doing this again? Really? F**king really?”

Former Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger offered cutting words to the president online. “This guy is insane. Actually insane. And seriously DUMB,” he wrote on X. In a separate post, Kinzinger called out Trump on his ignorance concerning aeronautics, saying that the president knew nothing about the complexities of piloting a helicopter. Apart from his political career, Kinzinger served as a lieutenant colonel in the Air National Guard. So if there’s anyone qualified to talk about the intricacies of airspace, it’s him.

Nevertheless, Trump claimed to have figured out the cause of the disaster: DEI. Trump spent the remainder of his press conference blasting federal inclusion initiatives, which he claimed allowed people with “severe intellectual disabilities” and “physical conditions” to obtain jobs as air traffic controllers. The president rattled off a list of examples of such “conditions,” which included “missing extremities,” “partial paralysis” and “dwarfism.” Trump went on to claim that these policies were embraced by the Obama administration, which he said attempted to change federal hiring practices because employee demographics skewed “too white.”

According to fact checkers at the New York Times, these claims are patently false. Trump was referencing efforts to employ people certain disabilities that began under his own administration. During Trump’s first term in office in 2019, the F.A.A. came out with a program to hire people with select disabilities to work in air traffic control. According to the program’s guidelines, the F.A.A. ensured that its candidates would be subjected to “same rigorous consideration” of their mental and physical aptitude for the job as non-disabled employees.

According to Tennessee Garvey, the chairman of the board of directors for the Organization of Black Aerospace Professionals, DEI has never once been a “sole cause or contributing cause” of an incident. Garvey adds that inclusivity initiatives have not lowered the standards of the aerospace industry, but rather removes barriers of entry for minorities seeking jobs in the sector.

Many in Trump’s orbit have blamed DEI for other disasters – Elon Musk recently blamed the California wildfires on diversity efforts in California fire departments.

Trump told reporters that air traffic controllers had to be the “at the highest level of genius,” implying that those working on the night of the crash fell bellow that standard. When asked by reporters how he knew that DEI was the cause of the disaster, Trump responded “because I have common sense.” According to aerospace pros like Adam Kinzinger, common sense would suggest otherwise.