Despicably Yours, Donald

 

The morning after a Blackhawk helicopter smashed into an American Airlines passenger jet,  killing everyone in both aircraft, Donald Trump announced the fault was in "Diversity."

Nobody had any idea what he was talking about. Well, that's not exactly true: Everybody knew what he was talking about.

Trying to get into his mind, one can get easily lost.

 All we know thus far is there was one White female soldier pilot, Cpt. Rebecca Lobach, who had 6 years experience flying Blackhawks on the helicopter, and there were two other soldiers. Did Mr. Trump mean the presence of the woman must have been the reason for the crash? He said this before the black boxes were even recovered, so we have no idea if Cpt. Lobach was at any of the controls, or even said anything during the doomed flight. The other pilots on the airplane were White males, so presumably Mr. Trump has no intention of blaming either of them.

Did he mean some "Diversity hire" in the control tower failed to do his/her job?

"Diversity" was responsible? 

What on earth was he even talking about?

Early reports suggest the helicopter pilot was supposed to look both ways before crossing the street, and he saw an airplane in his flight path, an airplane rising from the runway, and he avoided that one, but he did not see the other one coming, the American Airlines jet descending to land. All this is happening because there are multiple airplanes landing at National airport, one right after another, at night, with very little room or time in between, like a marching band executing elaborate patterns on the football field at halftime.

One expert interviewed on PBS, a woman Blackhawk pilot as it happens, noted there were only 3 soldiers on that helicopter, and that the usual crew would be 4, and that would allow one to look out the left, one for the right side and two to scan forward, each covering half of the visual field.  Whatever happened, it's pretty clear the crew missed seeing the airplane it hit.

A system with very little room for error. 

The wonder is it took so long to have this disaster.

The other wonder is why the military feels it should be flying helicopters around that hornets' nest known as National Airport.

Of course, Trump blamed everyone but himself: Peter Buttigige, Biden. Or possibly he was blaming Cpt. Lobach, who was also killed and female, ergo, she must be the culprit. Blaming the woman before any cockpit voice recorder had been recovered from the Potomac? The only thing he could know about her is that she was female.

I kept waiting to hear Mr. Trump blame the transgender movement, space lasers, the Governor of Virginia, the water spickets in Arlington, VA, the fake news, the Chinese, the failing New York Times, that fake climate change thing which is nothing more than a Chinese plot, vaccines, Gavin Newsome, Elizabeth Warren and/or the FBI, but he confined himself to Diversity, at least at that moment.

As Stephen Colbert noted, Mr. Trump is just not normal.

In fact, it goes beyond that. He is simply strange, or, as Tim Walz might say, Trump is truly weird. Or deranged. Or all of the above. 

What kind of man would blame this disaster on the one woman involved even before any evidence? Was he blaming an officer who had flown for 6 years? 

Of course, Mr. Trump denigrated John McCain for having been shot down in the skies of Vietnam. Why would he feel constrained from blaming Cpt. Lobach for having died over the Potomac?

And Mr. Trump has never even served because, you know, heel spurs. 

Tough Guy. Heel Spurs.

Mr. Trump, asked directly how he could connect the disaster to "Diversity" replied, "Common sense." 

Of all the explanations available, that "common sense" was perhaps the only explanation which we can eliminate ipso facto.

This disaster occurred on Mr. Trump's watch. 

Which is not to say the President can know about every training mission taking place around Washington, D.C. But that didn't stop him from claiming to know enough about this collision to announce the fault was Captain Diversity.  

He couldn't blame the passenger jet because it was piloted by White males, no Diversity there.

Does This Man Look Normal?

Looking at the menagerie Mr. Trump has paraded out: Kristi Noem, Pete Hegseth, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., you know they are as bizarre a lot as ever headed a Western government, going back to the dwarf Goebbels, the bloated Goering, the wild eyed Hess. 

Look at the folks Trump surrounds himself with.

They look like they were selected by the folks who brought us "Dr. Strangelove." (One of them even rails against fluoridated water. That's a movie worth re-watching now.)

Would you want any of them piloting a Blackhawk?

When you find yourself, as Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert have, trying to explain why it is wrong for Trump to say the crash was caused by "Diversity," before the bodies were retrieved from the icy waters of the river,   you know you're in trouble.

This is the strength of the Big Lie:

If you say something so wild it leaves everyone gob smacked, you have already achieved a sort of trump card, or a Trump card, as it were.