D.C. crash: Really, Mr. President?

Donald Trump’s flaws were amply on display last week in the disgusting and disgraceful way he turned a tragic midair collision into a vehicle to promote himself and his agenda.

Trump is egoistical; he always puts himself and his own interests above everyone else’s, and he sees everything that happens as being first and foremost about him. He is egotistical; he cannot stop talking about how important he is and how much people love him.

Ever since the radio was invented, presidents have taken to the airwaves in the role of comforter in chief whenever a major tragedy strikes, but not Trump. Just two hours and 29 minutes after an Army helicopter crashed into a civilian airliner, killing 67 people, he took to the internet and then to the airwaves to brag, in Trumpian style, about how he is the greatest president who ever lived.

He began his blame-game approach on his Truth Social site at 12:19 a.m. on Thursday:

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“The airplane was on a perfect and routine line of approach to the airport,” he wrote. “The helicopter was going straight at the airplane for an extended period of time. It is a CLEAR NIGHT and the lights on the plane were blazing, why didn’t the helicopter go up or down, or turn? Why didn’t the control tower tell the helicopter what to do instead of asking if they [in the helicopter] saw the plane.”

The blame game revved up Thursday morning at a press conference filled with self-serving and insensitive rants that he continued to spew that afternoon in the Oval Office.

At the press conference, after calling for a moment of silence, he launched into a tirade during which he put the immediate blame for the accident on the helicopter pilot but then said that the real blame belonged to Joe Biden and Barack Obama because they forced the Federal Aviation Administration to hire brainless incompetents, something he would never do or allow to be done.

During his first administration, he said, “I put safety first” by reversing the unsafe things Obama had done with his disastrous Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion policy. After he left office in 2021, Trump said, Biden went overboard in the opposite direction. “Obama, Biden, and the Democrats put policy first. And they put politics at a level that nobody’s ever seen because this was the lowest level.”

They were so fixated on promoting DEI, Trump said, that the policy forced the FAA to hire low-IQ people to run highly sophisticated equipment, something these people clearly were too dumb to do. (He said this even as he denied blaming the FAA’s air traffic controller who communicated with the helicopter.)

“We have to have our smartest people” working as air traffic controllers, he said. “It doesn’t matter what they look like, how they speak, who they are…. They have to be talented, naturally talented geniuses. You can’t have regular people doing that job.  They won’t be able to do it.”

That, Trump said, “was not so prior to [my] getting there when I arrived in 2016,” because of Obama’s DEI program, but “I made that change very early on because I always felt this was a job that … had to be superior intelligence,” but then Biden not only brought back Obama’s DEI initiatives, and made them “even worse.”

When asked by a reporter how he could make that conclusion without any evidence to back it up, Trump shot back with this: “Because I have common sense. Okay? And unfortunately, a lot of people don’t.”

Keep in mind that Trump was saying all this as families, friends, and colleagues of those 67 dead did not yet know if they would ever even have bodies to bury, but clearly that was of no concern to him, because this tragedy was about him and how much better a president he is than his predecessors.

Keep in mind, as well, that as Trump was speaking, Coast Guard divers were working in water that was reported to be between 33 and 36 degrees Fahrenheit. They were risking their lives doing so, because the protective immersion wetsuits they were wearing often are no match for such frigid temperatures. A reporter noted that fact in asking Trump when—when, not whether—he would visit the rescue site to thank those brave divers and the other 300-odd emergency workers who were on scene.

Said Trump scornfully, “What’s the site? The water? You want me to go swimming?”

What our 47th president failed to mention on Thursday or since then is that if hiring standards really were lowered to such dangerous levels, it was our 45th president who is to blame. That’s Donald J. Trump.

Trump said Obama’s weakened FAA standards were “very mediocre at best,” but he put “extraordinary” standards in their place, only to have Biden change them back. All Obama did, however, was to open the door to underrepresented minorities who wanted federal jobs. Trump not only kept those standards in place when he took office in 2017, he continued to stick with them even after a class action lawsuit was filed in 2019 challenging those standards. (That case is still pending.)

Trump, among other things, ridiculed an FAA program he said Obama forced on it that was designed to hire air traffic controllers who had certain physical and psychological disabilities. The FAA did launch such a program—but in 2019, when Trump was president. The FAA made it very clear, however, that all candidates had to meet the same exacting qualifications as always had been in place. The FAA’s track record has proven that to be true.

Bluntly stated, Trump used the deaths of 67 people, most of whose bodies still were unrecovered at that point, to make political points that were a total lie.

It gets worse, though. At his press conference on Thursday, Trump said, “My administration will set the highest possible bar for aviation safety.” Yet at around 8:30 p.m. on Thursday, with 27 bodies still to be recovered and a shortage of air traffic controllers considered by then to have been a factor in the fatal collision (one controller that night had to handle two control tasks at the same time because of it), the air traffic controllers the FAA does employ were among those who for the second time that week received an email from Trump’s Office of Personnel Management offering them financial incentives, apparently in violation of federal law, “to find a job in the private sector as soon as you would like to do so.”

Challenged on CNN on Monday of this week about the contradictory nature of the buyouts, given Trump’s bluster, the new transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, said that air traffic controllers were not eligible for the buyout, nor was anyone else in federal employee who hold jobs affecting people’s lives.

The FAA’s air traffic control system is seriously understaffed, so much so that it is nothing short of a miracle that there has not been a tragedy like last week’s in the last 15 years.

The blame for that, however, belongs mainly to the congressional Republicans who literally blackmailed Obama and the Democrats in 2011 to agree to the Budget Control Act, which, among other things, made sure that the FAA would not have the funds needed to staff the air control system properly and safely. The blackmail was in their very seriously intended threat to force the government to default on its financial obligations by not raising the debt ceiling that year.

Trump also shares some of the blame. In 2018, when the FAA was barely managing to restore controller staffing to safer levels, Trump shut down the government for a record 35 days because Congress, including a unanimous Senate, did not add the $5.7 billion in that year’s appropriations budget that he needed to build his U.S.-Mexico border wall. That shutdown made it more difficult for government departments and agencies to recruit and retain talent, the FAA included. That’s a situation that still continues today.

It will only get worse if air traffic controllers responded positively to Trump’s Deferred Resignation plan, assuming somehow it is upheld by the courts.

Trump exhibits one trait Judaism abhors, especially in leaders—arrogance (ga-avah)—and he lacks humility (anavah), the one trait it values in them. Leaders are supposed to emulate Moses, who was “the most humble human being on earth.” (See Numbers 12:3.) That is why Deuteronomy 17:18–20 mandated that Israel’s kings had to keep a personal copy of the Torah with them “at all times” and to constantly study it in order “not [to] act arrogantly” in any way. Because Jeremiah said, “Hear, you, and give ear, be not proud, for the Lord has spoken” (see verse 13:15), a discussion in the Babylonian Talmud tractate Sota 4b-5a declared arrogance to be a prohibited trait akin to idol-worship.

Maimonides, the Rambam, advises “the man who is full of pride” to “debase himself by sitting in the lowliest of places dressed shamefully in tattered rags, and to do other such things until the arrogance is uprooted from his heart….” (See his Mishneh Torah, the Laws of Human Dispositions 2:2.)

Donald Trump violates Judaism’s dictates for leadership. Judaism also warns us to avoid supporting such arrogant leaders, as witness the fate that befell the arrogant Korach’s followers, for example, when the ground opened up beneath them (see Numbers 16). Sadly, it is a lesson too many of us have chosen to ignore.

Shammai Engelmayer is a rabbi-emeritus of Congregation Beth Israel of the Palisades and an adult education teacher in Bergen County. He is the author of eight books and the winner of 10 awards for his commentaries. His website is www.shammai.org.