Trump’s Transportation Secretary’s Comment Was More Asinine Than His Regarding No Survivors Crash

The tragedy of the airliner/helicoper crash at Reagan National Airport Wednesday night is a harbinger of what to expect in this kakistocracy of an administration. Kakistocracy means governance by the least qualified and you are now going to see that concept leap out of the dictionary and into a starring place in your life. All of us are in for that experience. Former Fox Business host and star of reality TV’s The Real World, is not up for this task. And that is putting it very mildly.

“Obviously it is not standard to have aircraft collide,” Duffy told reporters Thursday morning. “I want to be clear on that.”

Air travel used to be much safer than ground travel. I would not look for that stat to hold with this guy in charge. Plus, he really has no business opining about what happened this early on in the game. An investigation needs to take place — oh, but, did I tell you? Elon Musk decided to chase away a lot of the FAA investigators, because this would save government “fat” and end up lining his pockets. Golly, there is that.

The Federal Aviation Administration currently has no Senate-confirmed leader after top administrator Michael Whitaker was forced out under pressure from Elon Musk, who had demanded his resignation in September for proposing fines of more than $600,000 for SpaceX over safety concerns, reported The Daily Beast.

“The FAA space division is harassing SpaceX about nonsense that doesn’t affect safety while giving a free pass to Boeing even after NASA concluded that their spacecraft was not safe enough to bring back the astronauts,” Musk posted Sept. 17 on his X platform.

Musk has complained that Whitaker was blocking his goal of sending humans to Mars.

“The fundamental problem is that humanity will forever be confined to Earth unless there is radical reform at the FAA!” the tech mogul tweeted at an Australian YouTuber who says the FAA “should not exist.”

Trump also fired the heads of the Transportation Security Administration and all the members of the Aviation Security Advisory Committee the day after taking office, saying that the Department of Homeland Security was eliminating the membership of all advisory committees to eliminate the purported :misuse of resources and ensuring that DHS activities prioritize our national security.”

The aviation security committee was mandated by Congress after the 1988 PanAm 103 bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland, so it technically still exists but won’t have any members to carry out its responsibilities to oversee safety issues at airlines and airports.

Before the newly inaugurated president reportedly fired them, the panel included representatives from airlines, major unions and members of a group associated with the victims of the PanAm 103 bombing, and the vast majority of their recommendations for safety measures have been adopted over the years.

“I naively thought, ‘oh they’re not going to do anything in the new administration, to put security at risk — aviation security at risk,’ but I’m not so sure,” said Stephanie Bernstein, whose husband was killed in the bombing and served on the committee, eight days before the collision that killed 67 people in both aircraft.

The Trump administration also sent an email this week to 2.3 million federal employees from the Office of Personnel Management, which is now packed with Musk allies and loyalists, asking them to commit to the MAGA mission or accept a buyout.

Air traffic controllers were among the millions of government workers who received the email, which used similar language to a message sent to Twitter employees when Musk took over in fall 2022, even though the FAA has already been trying to manage a persistent shortage of those crucial aviation safety workers.

The investigation into the collision will be managed by the independent National Transportation Safety Board, which is chaired by Jennifer Homendy – who has also clashed with Musk over the safety of self-driving software in his Tesla vehicles.

So you clearly see the lay of the land here. The government is in the process of being sacked and pillaged by people who are television personalities. They look the part, sound the part, but do they have any substance or ability to do the part? Hell, no. In Trump world, you only need to be able to talk the talk, forget about walking the walk.

The Cabinet official’s response did not inspire much confidence, [his crack about “it’s not standard to have aircraft collide”] especially after the newly inaugurated president reportedly chased off many of the officials and federal employees who would otherwise be responsible for aviation safety and investigating the crash.

“No f—— s—,” said progressive influencer Alex Cole, responding to Duffy’s remark.

“Don’t worry about your aviation safety America, because the head of the Transportation Department is no longer ‘woke,’ but is in fact the guy from MTV’s ‘The Real World,'” posted blogger Oliver Willis.

“’Oh, we shouldn’t ask the new Secretary of Transportation any hard questions about this disaster; that would be unfair, somehow; anyway back to our regularly scheduled programming about DEI,'” added Duke sociologist Kieran Healy.

“Duffy’s comment that the accident was ‘preventable’ echoes an earlier statement from Trump, which appeared to put the spotlight on the helicopter,” said Benedikt Kammel, global aviation editorial leader for Bloomberg News. “It’s unusual for officials to come out this early with theories, but Trump isn’t known to take his time in publicly airing his views.”

“Duffy is again commenting on the circumstances of the crash by characterizing the flight paths of both aircraft as normal, and ‘not unusual for what happens in the DC airspace,'” agreed his Bloomberg colleague Ryan Beene, the global business editor. “It’s worth emphasizing that it’s highly irregular for anyone other than NTSB personnel, even senior government officials, to share details about an airplane crash, much less characterize what occurred during a crash. Those details typically fall under the NTSB’s purview.”

“Staffing the government with a bunch of people who are used to opining on TV means you get a bunch of government officials who think they are supposed to opine on TV,” said Washington Post columnist Philip Bump.

Now if you’re getting a sense of deja vu on this, you’re right. This was the set up when the COVID pandemic struck. Trump had fired the government team assigned to dealing with global pandemics, same reason as the FAA people; he thinks everybody in government is like a server or gardener at Mar-a-Lago. You can just hire one off the street when you need one. No. And we saw where that got us and 1.1 million Americans dead. How many will die on Trump’s watch this time, we don’t know.

Trump 2.0 is off to one hell of a start. Welcome to Kakistocracy. Maybe we should just rename the country, doncha ya think? The UnUnited States of Kakistocracy, where rulership of TV hosts reigns. Because that is where you are living and are going to be living for four, interminable years. Get used to it.

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