Maga is blaming ‘dwarves’ and trans people for the Washington crash

Every day, the world seems to get stupider and stupider and our leaders seem to get nastier and nastier. Nobody expects empathy or accuracy from Donald Trump but, even by the extremely low standards to which he is held, his reaction to the tragic mid-air collision in Washington DC that killed 67 people on Wednesday night was shocking.

The collision between an American Airlines passenger jet and a US army Black Hawk helicopter was the first fatal commercial airline crash in the US since 2009 and the first national tragedy to occur since Trump’s inauguration. It should have been a moment of national unity, a moment of national mourning. (And, Trump, let us remember, promised during his inauguration speech that he was going be a “peacemaker and unifier.”) The president’s reaction to this horrible loss of life wasn’t to do any unifying, however. It was to engage in divisive finger-pointing. We won’t know the complete details about what caused the crash for a while, but that didn’t stop Trump from speculating wildly.

“We do not know what led to this crash, but we have some very strong opinions and ideas,” Trump said at a news conference on Thursday. He then went on to dish out blame to everyone except himself. It was Joe Biden’s fault, he said. It was Obama’s fault! It was Pete Buttigieg’s fault! It was the fault of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs! Trump spent a lot of time discussing the Federal Aviation Administration’s DEI initiatives and, when asked if he thought the collision was the result of diversity hiring, said: “It just could have been.”

Trump isn’t the only one using a tragedy to attack DEI programs. Fox’s Jesse Watters said on Wednesday that the crash may have been the result of the Obama-Biden administration trying to give jobs to “dwarves” and “people with transgender issues”.

JD Vance has similarly insinuated that even if they can’t find any minorities or women to directly blame for the crash, it was still somehow the fault of DEI. “When you don’t have the best standards in who you’re hiring, it means on the one hand, you’re not getting the best people in government,” the vice-president said in a press conference on Thursday. “But on the other hand, it puts stresses on the people who are already there.”

This sort of rhetoric isn’t just disgusting; it puts people at risk. Viral posts have been circulating online falsely identifying Jo Ellis, a transgender pilot with the Virginia national guard, as one of the pilots of the Black Hawk helicopter. One account spreading the lies wrote: “So now that the pilot of the Blackhawk has been identified as Jo Ellis, a transgender woman, can we admit Trump was right about the entire thing, or is it too soon?” Poor Ellis has had to release a statement on Facebook as “proof of life” in response to these posts.

The fact that the Maga crowd immediately blamed DEI for this tragedy is depressingly predictable. It’s been a longstanding talking point among Trumpers that DEI is to blame for all the ills of the world. When there was a safety incident on a Boeing plane last year, for example, Elon Musk went on a baseless rant about how the aviation industry had “prioritized DEI hiring over safety”. He also seemed to endorse a racist tweet suggesting students at historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) have lower IQs and therefore shouldn’t become pilots.

To be clear, this is what the Trump crowd’s obsession with DEI is really about: plain old bigotry. Elon Musk has called DEI “just another word for racism”, and he is right, just not in the way he thinks. DEI has become a slur; a nasty euphemism for Black people, brown people, LGBTQ+ people and everyone else Trumpers hate. What the Maga crowd seem to be saying every time they talk about DEI and meritocracy is that they think white people, particularly white men, are innately superior to everyone else. What they are saying is that they think the least qualified white man is still more qualified than the most qualified woman of colour.

This sort of attitude didn’t originate with Trump, to be fair. Almost 20 years ago, I remember one of my peers calling me a “diversity hire” to my face when he found out I’d got a job at a law firm he had been rejected from. He simply couldn’t believe there was a scenario in which I might have beaten him on merit. Still, while this attitude may not be new, what’s different now is the extent to which DEI is being used as a slur by influential figures. What’s different now is the glee with which large corporations are axing their DEI programs, relieved not to have to pretend to care about inclusivity or equity anymore.

Then again, the likes of Trump don’t care about anything other than themselves, do they? Trump certainly doesn’t seem to care about the 67 people who died in the plane crash. When asked about his plans to visit the crash site, he made a sarcastic joke: “The water? You want me to go swimming?” Honestly, yes. Please go for a very long swim. As the Brits say: get in the sea!

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Justice for Fuzai! China’s first-ever corgi police dog lost his lunar new year bonus after he was caught sleeping on the job and urinating in his food bowl. Fuzai, an explosive-detection dog, was also reprimanded for looking fed-up at work. Still, he’s probably looking a little happier now. After pressure from his many fans, it seems Fuzai may have got his bonus in the end. Paws well that ends well.