Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) on Sunday suggested that President Donald Trump’s move to blame last week’s midair collision of a passenger jet with a military helicopter in Washington, D.C., on diversity hiring was a calculated decision to distract from his own administration’s failings.
In an interview with CNN’s “State of the Union,” the senator blasted Trump for singling out DEI as the main cause of the crash in the early hours of the tragedy, calling his words “absolutely stomach-turning.”
The senator, though, explained that Trump had good reason to share the baseless theory, which has also since been adopted by Vice President JD Vance.
“I think the president didn’t want to be asked tough questions like, why did you let Elon Musk force the FAA administrator to resign? When this crash happened, there was no FAA administrator because he had clashed with Elon Musk.”
Mike Whitaker, the former head of the FAA, left the role on Inauguration Day after a feud with Musk over safety issues at the billionaire’s SpaceX company. Following Wednesday’s accident, Trump named a new acting administrator of the FAA.
Meanwhile, Kaine ripped Trump for scrapping an aviation safety advisory committee within the Department of Homeland Security as one of his first actions as president. While the panel technically still exists, it no longer has any members probing safety issues at airlines and airports after the Trump administration issued a memo announcing they were removing the members of all advisory committees, according to The Associated Press.
Kaine also suggested the president’s decision to offer buyouts to all federal workers, including air traffic controllers while the FAA is already facing a shortage of them, was particularly ill-advised.
“I think the president was nervous that he was going to be asked questions about his own administration’s policies that were deemphasizing air safety, and so he decided to have everybody chased down a rabbit hole of his DEI allegations with no evidence,” Kaine told CNN’s Jake Tapper.
Trump on Friday doubled down on his assessment that it was “common sense” that diversity, equity and inclusion practices would have adverse effects.
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Asked if he has any concerns that those comments could interfere with the formal probe into Wednesday’s collision, Trump said: “No.”
“I think they’ll do an investigation and it’ll probably come out the way I said it,” Trump said.
Authorities on Sunday said they have recovered 55 of the 67 bodies of the people killed as a result of the crash.